[Tex/LaTex] How to generate a LaTeX template for a small college course

templates

I just started a course where every student has to write some stuff as a homework (10-15 pages).To ease the creation of such a document I want to provide a template for LaTeX (as it is most spread).

I thought it would be easy when I provide a small archive where they will find a template.tex, with some basic layout settings, title page as well as some preselected packages, so they just can start typing their work. Additionally I will include some helpful latex documents in that archive and a basic directory structure. However, I wanted to make a modern template: Paying regard to l2tabu and consistency in the document was also an aim. I know I could hide most of the preamble in a separate document and let it include, but I wanted to have at least all template code in one single file.

I think a document class would be too much work/overhead for this small course <20 attendees.

How would you do that?

If you are interested on my draft: http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~math/t.zip. As the course is in german, please regard specific European settings as paper format A4, etc.

Best Answer

Well in my opinion such templates are only a source of problems. template.tex contains a lot code which is probably unnecessary or are simple design decisions. This makes it difficult for students to understand which package/what code is responsible for which effect and to make a minimal example when he/she runs into a problem.

Imho a template should only load babel, inputenc (or selinput), fontenc, microtype, perhaps amsmath, perhaps hyperref (without specific options), perhaps scrpage2 (ditto). Every other information should go in small examples: example-bibliography, example-tabulars, example-colorlinks etc. This will force the students to build their document in steps and so help them to understand the structure. It will also give them a collection of minimal examples they can use for tests (and questions).

Beside this here some problems in template.tex:

  1. \setlength{\parindent}{0pt}: Not a good idea, better use one the of options of scrartcl.

  2. \usepackage{geometry} /\newgeometry{margin=0.1cm}: This will overwrite the settings of typearea, so should be considered carefully. (And it shouldn't be done only for the titlepage).

  3. \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} is missing.

  4. backend=bibtex: Why not biber?

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