LaTex Boilerplate

This is a simple preconfigured boilerplate for medium-sized LaTex projects including continuous integration for GitLab CI. It's based on the scrbook document class and currently layed out for german scientiefic documents.

Basic Structure

The main entry point for the document compilation is the file main.tex in the repo root. Besides setting some common parameters for the document (like author name, title, date etc.), the basic document structure is created here (mostly by including seperate files) in the following order:

• configuration (config/config.tex)
• title page (additionals/title.tex)
• table of contents
• list of acronyms (additionals/acronyms.tex)
• list of figures
• list of tables
• list of code listings
• chapter files (chapter/*, needs to be filled up manually)
• bibliography (config/references.tex, using the entries defined in library/library.bib)
• declaration of authorship (additionals/affirmation.tex)

If you don't need one of the predefined document parts or want to omit it, simply remove or comment out the corresponding statements in main.tex.

(i) Please note: Before starting with content, you should change the common variables in main.tex.

Inserting basic content

For each chapter create a single chapter file in the chapter/ directory. Chapter files need to reference the main file using

%!TEX root = ../main.tex

Next, include it in main.tex using

\input{chapter/myfile}
\newpage

Numbering the files with prefixes (like 01_introduction) is recommended.

Bibliography

The bibliography index uses biblatex. Entries are taken from library/library.bib, you may add your PDF files here too and link them to the bibliography entries (e.g. using biblatex frontend/gui tools like JabRef).

To be included in the document, every bibliography entry needs to be keyword-classified manually. For each keyword there will be a seperate subsection in the bibliography section in the document. If there's no bibliography entry for a keyword, the bibliography type will be ommitted and no subsection will be created in the bibliography section in the document.

Here's an overview of the supported document types and their keywords:

type	biblatex document type	keyword
monographs	@Book	mono
essays	@Article	mag
articles	@Article	art
web pages	@Misc	web
legislative documents		leg
company internal docs	@Misc	comp

References within the document are usually done using the \autocite statement. The default citation format is footnote. When referencing within a footnote, please create a manual reference using \cite.

(!) For the references to be syntactically complete and correct, pleae consider the correct document types shown in the table above.

Layout and further configuration

The predefined document layout is the following:

• page size: A4
• borders: left=40mm, right=20mm, top=25mm, bottom=25mm (using geometry)
• Roman page numbering is used for introductory pages; arabic page numbering starts with first content chapter (see main.tex for that)

Further configuration can be done in config/config.tex.

Document Outline

The scrbook document class provides the following elements (in said order) to outlining a document:

• \part{}: roman numbering, e.g. I
• \chapter{}: arabic 1st level numbering, e.g. 1
• \section{}: arabic 2nd level numbering, e.g. 1.1
• \subsection{}: arabic 3rd level numbering, e.g. 1.1.1
• \subsubsection{}: arabic 3rd level numbering, e.g. 1.1.1.1
• \paragraph{}: no numbering and independent from preceding hierarchy elements

Continuous Integration

The .gitlab-ci.yml file comes preconfigured to spellcheck and compile the LaTex document.

Spellchecking

Spellchecking is done using hunspell. As LaTex \input directives are not recognized, all TeX files containing content need to be spellchecked seperately. Therefore, only the chapter files are included in the spellcheck.

If you need certain words to be ignored during spellcheck (e.g. if they're not in the standard dictionaries), please insert them into the file .hunspellignore. This is a simple word list structured by one word per line.

By default, the spellcheck job is allowed to fail.

Building the PDF

The CI pipeline will build main.tex (and everything included here) to PDF using xelatex. It provides better handling of unicode characters and typesets special characters (like german umlauts) more precise.

The build output is generated to main.pdf, which can be downloaded from GitLab coordinator for two days (each pipeline run).

(!) Please adapt the configuration to your own runner setup if neccessary.

Some special effects...

Lists

Please use \compactitem environment for unordered lists and \compactenum environment for ordered lists.

Images

Resource files for images may be stored in resources/. To reference an image from within the document, use the figure environment:

\begin{figure}[H]
    \centering
    \fbox{\includegraphics[width=0.75\textwidth]{resources/myimage.png}}
    \caption{Caption for my image goes here...}
    \label{fig:myimage}
    \source{source of the image}
\end{figure}

The \label is used to cross-reference the image using \ref.

The \caption may contain a usual \cite directive (see below).

Acronyms

If you introduce acronyms, add them to config/abkuerzungen.tex in the following way:

\acro{VMCS}{Virtual Machine Control Structure}

(i) Please note: If you have acronyms that are longer than four characters, you may extend the parameter in brackets behind the \begin{acronym} statement.

Code Listings

Listings (code snippets) are done using the minted environment. It provides syntax highlighting for several languages via an external Python library (Pygments) and has comprehensive layout capabilities. Though, handling of captions is a bit complicated, which is why it's wrapped into a custom code environment:

\begin{code}
    \inputminted{bash}{resources/yoursource.sh}
    \label{yourlabel}
    \captionof{listing}{Some Caption goes here...}
    \source{and you can tell people where you got the code from...}
\end{code}

Config for syntax highlighting is centrally provided in config/config.tex using the \setminted directive. For changes, see the official docs.

Paragraph Distances and Onehalf Spacing

There are certain LaTex environments that cause huge paragraph distances in combination with the onehalfspacing option (1.5 line height). For that reason you may wrap such environments (e.g. lists, images, tables, paragraphs etc.) with a vspace:

\vspace{-\topsep}