texnew 1.3

An automatic LaTeX template creator and manager.

Using this program.

You can install this command line tool - as well as the module - with pip install texnew. If you call the command line version, texnew looks for template information at ~/.texnew/ under a specific folder structure. You should also install the included templates there, which you can find at texnew-templates. Run texnew -h for basic information about the script.

Updating your templates

If you’ve created a template using this program with texnew version at least 1.0, you can automatically update the template using texnew -u <file.tex> <template>. This saves file macros you’ve defined (under file-specific macros), as well as the main contents of your document (after document start), and places them in a newly generated template, generated from the updated macro files. Your old file is saved in the same directory with _old appended to the name.

Checking your templates

If you made changes to macro files, you can run texnew -c to automatically compile your templates and check for LaTeX errors (any error that shows up in your log file). Note that the checker works by making a system call to latexmk, so it may not work on your system. It also might not work on Windows no matter what. I’m not sure.

Including user info

User info files can be found at user.yaml, user_private.yaml.

You can input custom information here to be automatically added to templates whenever you generate them; see Formatting below for more detail. You can also use user_private.yaml, the program will prioritize (if it exists). If neither user file exists, you will get a warning but the program will still generate a template (without substitutions).

Roll your own templates

It’s pretty easy to make your own templates. Here’s the key information about the structure of this program:

1. Templates: share/templates

   • Define new templates in the existing style. There are three (mandatory) options. doctype can be any valid LaTeX document type (e.g. article, book). formatting must be any filename (without extension) defined in Formatting. macros must be any filename (without extension) defined in Macros.

2. Macros: share/macros

   • Macro files stored here are accessed by the macro option in the templates. You can add your own macros, or pretty much whatever you want here.

3. Formatting: share/formatting

   • Formatting files stored here are accessed by the formatting option in the templates. I’ve generally used them to define formatting for the file appearance (fonts, titlepages, etc). They must include \begin{document}. Then \end{docment} label is automatically placed afterwards.

   • Wherever <+key+> appears in a formatting document, they are automatically replaced by the relevant info in the user.yaml file. key can be any string. You can define new keys.

4. Defaults: share/defaults

   • Default files are loaded every time, regardless of the template used. Don’t change the file names or weird things will happen, but feel free to change the defaults to whatever you want. doctype.tex must have the document class, and the tag <+doctype+> is automatically substituted by the defined value in a template. macros.tex is for default macros, and packages.tex for default packages, as evidenced by the name.

Import Order

To avoid errors when designing templates, it is useful to know the order in which the template files are placed. This is given as follows: 1. share/defaults/doctype.tex 2. share/defaults/packages.tex 3. share/defaults/macros.tex 4. Any macro files included in the template, imported in the same order specified. 5. A space for file-specific macros (user macros are placed here when updating a file). 6. share/formatting/*.tex, whatever formatting file you specified 7. A space for the main document (document is placed here when updating). As a general rule, I try to avoid importing anything in the formatting file to avoid conflict with user imports (notable exception: font packages).