[Tex/LaTex] Looking for LaTeX templates.

document-classestemplates

where can I find a 'professional' document templates in LaTeX. I need two different one to the other user documentation and second for developer documentation. I know that I can safely create it myself, but I have no idea of the appearance of these documents.

Best Answer

CTAN is the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. You might try looking at some of the alternative document classes there.

Snippet managers

A flexible and powerful way of working with templates is to use a snippet manager. In Replace the `$$ ... $$` macro with the `\[ ... \]` macros? - Prefer the way LaTeX lays it out, but `$` are faster to write you find a simple explanation of how a snippet manager works. What you do is simply to store each template as a separate snippet and use the power of the snippet manager to modify it on expansion.

YASnippet

Here is an example with YASnippet, a snippet manager for Emacs. The following steps are how to create a simple article template:

Enter the mode you want the snippets in. In this case I guess it is LaTeX-mode.
Do M-x yas/new-snippet.
Enter a name for the snippet.
You will now get a chance to edit the snippet. Mark everything by doing C-x h, then kill it by C-w.

You will now have an empty snippet. Paste the following into it and make sure the snippet ends after \end{document} and not on a new line:

# -*- mode: snippet -*-
# name: article
# key: arttemp
# --
\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[${1:english}]{babel}

\title{${2:Title}}
\author{${3:Author}}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

$0

\end{document}

Do C-c C-c to save and load the snippet.

Now you can use the snippet in LaTeX-mode by writing arttemp and then pressing Tab. Note how $1, $2, $3 and $0 defines tab stops and that the three first has default values which can be overridden. Here is an animation that shows how the snippet works:

Animation of the snippet above

Obviously the snippet in the example is a very simple snippet. One snippet I use as a template for articles is 172 lines long. It contains \usepackages for the packages I commonly use, package configuration and macro definitions for macros I commonly use. For more information on how to write snippets see the documentation.

With YASnippet your snippets are stored as files. The manual describes how you can organize snippets. I keep my snippets in ~/.emacs.d/mysnippets and load them by the following in my .emacs:

(setq yas/root-directory "~/.emacs.d/mysnippets"); Develop and keep personal snippets under ~/emacs.d/mysnippets
(yas/load-directory yas/root-directory); Load the snippets

By syncing ~/.emacs.d/mysnippets between computers I get the same snippets on all of them.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] LaTeX templates bundled with MikTeX or elsewhere

[Tex/LaTex] Working with templates

Snippet managers

YASnippet