I built this LaTeX template as the starting point for all of my homework assignments. I've used it with much success over the past couple years -- speeding up my workflow -- but it is not 100% perfect.
I used to create LaTeX documents from scratch at the start of every assignment, but I would spend hours tweaking the same things on each assignment (i.e. margins, fonts, captions, etc). I also found that I was copy-and-pasting between projects to save time. Over time, it just made sense to build an official template -- this is it!
This template is an opinionated work in progress. It was designed to work around my needs, but I appreciate feedback in order to make this more useful for everyone.
The design choices I made center around the tools I use. Here are a few of them:
- Vim
- gnumake
- Preview.app (OS X document viewer)
- Markdown (via Pandoc)
My workflow is efficient, but there are some concessions.
1.) The primary document is written in markdown, but not everything comes out exactly as I like (e.g. code, headers, graphics, and tables). But since Pandoc just ignores LaTeX, I can include it in my markdown and it falls through to the generated document. Thus, I use copious amounts of LaTeX in my markdown files.
2.) Not everyone likes calling make test to build their document, but I find it handy. Inside Vim I've bound a key sequence to quickly build a PDF and show it to me. The Vim command do this is :map ,t :w\|:!make test<cr>. With this, I can write a sentence, hit escape, and then comma and t, and I see the changes I made immediately.
3.) This template is largely configured for OS X, although I am moving towards supporting Linux as well. Currently I use an applescript called focus which refreshes the PDF document in Preview.app. This is handy for OS X, but I have not written a similar script for Linux yet.
If you have any recommendations I'd like to hear them.
Thanks.
Do this and you should have be ready to go.
cd ~/Documents
git clone git://github.com/gbluma/latex-boilerplate.git newdocument
cd newdocument
make && make open
# do work
make test
# check text for sloppy word usage
make check