/Senior_seminar_templates

LaTeX templates for UMM CSci senior seminar.

Primary LanguageTeXMIT LicenseMIT

UMM CSci Senior seminar templates

LaTeX templates for University of Minnesota, Morris, Computer Science senior seminar proceedings and presentations.

There are three main components here:

  • Annotated_bibliography has annotated_bibliography.tex and annotated_bibliography.bib, which provide an example of using LaTeX and BibTeX to generate an annotated bibliography.
  • Sample_paper has sample_paper.tex along with a figure and a BibTeX file provide an example of using LaTeX and BibTeX to generate a basic paper.
  • Sample_talk has Sample_talk.tex along with a number of photographs and PDF figures provide an example of using LaTeX and the Beamer package to generate a set of slides.

Both the annotated bibliography and the sample paper use sig-alternate.cls, which is our modified version of the ACM sig-alternate document class. The primary changes we've made to the ACM document class and examples are:

  • Replaced the copyright notice with a Creative Commons license.
  • Removed the ACM document fees.
  • Removed the terms and categories, which seem to really just be confusing relic of a pre-search-engine era.
  • Simplified the examples somewhat, removing features such as multiple authors that we're not likely to use.
  • "Forced" the paper size to US Letter (8.5 by 11 inches). This is useful because tools like TexMaker default to A4, and this overrides that.

Since the annotated bibliography example and the sample paper both use sig-alternate.cls, we have a link to it in the annotated bibliography folder instead of a second copy. This will hopefully make it easier to ensure that we don't end up with two different versions out there with slightly different behaviors.

Using LaTeX

We have LaTeX and the TeXMaker GUI installed in the lab, so you should be able to clone a copy of your repo and work in the lab without any problems.

If you want to install LaTeX on your own computer(s), there are a variety of tools you can use. Be prepared, though, for a quite substantial download; the full LaTeX install is very large (currently 2.5GB – there are lots of tools, libraries, fonts, etc.) and can take a while even on the University network (I don't think the server on the other end is very fast).

You could do the whole thing on the command line with editors like emacs or vim, but there are a number of more WYSIWYG LaTeX GUIs worth considering:

There are also some on-line, cloud-based solutions for folks that prefer that route:

These are freemium, and some of the pay features would be pretty useful, so that's an issue to consider. They also don't necessary interact beautifully with git, so it you and your advisor want to use git/Github, then that's a concern.

Some notes on LaTeX

Run LaTeX and BibTeX. To fully build a LaTeX document you have to run LaTeX (sometimes twice – long story), then run BibTex, and then run LaTeX again. This is tedious and annoying, and a holdover from the early days of TeX/LaTeX when computers had very little memory. Some GUI tools like TexStudio try to be "smart" and automatically (re)run things when necessary, but that doesn't always work, and sometimes you still have to re-run things there to get a complete build.

Make sure you use PdfLatex instead of "plain" LaTeX. The story here is long and complex, but "plain" LaTeX assumes that (a) all your figures are in PostScript and (b) you want your output in DVI format (instead of PDF). Neither of these assumptions have been likely true in over a decade, and PdfLatex makes more "modern" assumptions that your figures are PDFs and that you want our output to be PDF. So when we say "run LaTeX", we really mean "run PdfLaTeX" in most settings.