Uvic Co-op Work Term Template

A set of LaTeX files that generates a work term report following the Uvic co-op department's style guide. A full installation of LaTeX is recommended.

The report looks like this.

Installation

OSX & Unix

$ git clone [email protected]:trstephen/work-term-report.git ~/<whatever>
$ cd ~/<whatever>
$ make

make will create wt_template.pdf and letter/letter_of_transmittal.pdf which match their *_demo.pdf counterparts.

Windows

Use your favorite Tex IDE to create the report. Use Biber for the bibliography.

Renaming the template

You'll probably want to rename the project to something other than wt_template. A few parts of the project need to be changed on rename:

1. wt_template.tex -> report.tex
2. wt_template.bib -> report.bib
3. \addbibresource{wt_template.bib} -> \addbibresource{report.bib}
4. Links in the makefiles, if you use them

If you're on OSX you can use rename.sh to automate this process. Removing the '' here will make the script work for non-BSD versions of sed.

# Change all references to `wt_template`
$ ./rename.sh my_report

Tips for maintaining a large text document in git

1. I've found it helpful to break up large reports into several files each covering a chapter or section. wt_template.tex is full of package includes, macros and other cruft that you don't need to look at once it's set up. The text you care about ends up in the middle of this cruft. It's easier to track down changes in a diff when they come from multiple single purpose files instead of a single monolith.
2. Use line breaks for a manageable diff. Latex will join lines that don't have a blank separating line so you can break at 80 or so characters. I've found that this can feel unnatural when writing and made this gist to insert line breaks at new sentences before committing.
3. TexStudio is a cross-platform Latex IDE that does a great job of handing large projects. The tabbed interface is very helpful for managing multiple files.

• The compile chain for this project can be defined within TexStudio by accessing Settings > Build and setting
  • Default Compiler txs:///pdflatex | txs:///biber | txs:///pdflatex
  • Default Bibliography Tool Biber

Issues

Let me know!

I've built this on a TeXLive 2014 installation and wouldn't be surprised if some of the more finicky features -- such as the appendix numbering and bibliography style -- don't output as expect on other versions.