LaTeX Templates

Utilities for managing configuration templates of LaTeX projects. The templates are handled by Jinja2, with configuration loaded from YAML files.

Dependencies

This depends on PyYAML and Jinja2, both of which may be installed via pip:

pip install PyYAML Jinja2

Usage

To generate templates, use the script latex-templates.py. Call it with the -h option for further information.

Templates and Libraries

This contains several LaTeX project templates which may share some code in the form of libraries. Each project template corresponds to a subdirectory of templates/ with the mandatory files described below. Libraries are a collection of templates for located in libraries/, which are can be included into any template. The organization of libraries is purely by convention.

Each project template consists of a directory containing a default configuration file default-conf.yaml, a contents template contents.yaml and multiple file templates, possibly including subdirectories.

The default configuration file default-conf.yaml should contain all values that will be use in the file templates. These values may be overridden by another configuration file when instantiating the project template.

The content template files.yaml determines which file templates will be instantiated for this project. Its instantiation should result in a list where each item is either a pair {src: x, tgt: y} or a single string, which is then used as both source and target. The src field defines the path to the file template, relative either to the project template root or the the libraries root. The tgt field determines the path to the generated file, relative to the generated project root.

Template Syntax

Instead of the regular Jinja2 syntax, the following is adopted since it integrates better with LaTeX.

Statements: \STMT{ ... } instead of {% ... %}
Expressions: \EXPR{ ... } instead of {{ ... }}
Comments: \#{ ... } instead of {# .. #}
Line Statements: %$ ... instead of # ...
Line Comments: %# ... instead of ## ...

Why create this?

The main motivation is to have a lightweight set of LaTeX libraries with the following requirements:

Easy reuse when creating new projects
Easy sharing of projects with co-authors
Suitability of projects for professional copy-editing before publication