LaTeX is a mark-up language which allows creating big scalable documents by writing plain text using commands to enrich the text, embed images and tables, cite and reference other sources like papers, books and websites scientifically. The project is then compiled by so-called Tex distribution (e.g. Tex Live) to produce the final document, usually a PDF file. One writes in the mark-up language in a text editor of choice and generates the document afterwards. Writing a text this way is not a WYSIWYG-style of writing like for example in Word where you see how the document looks like. With LaTeX one writes plain text and formatting commands to tell LaTeX how the document should look like. The compilation process will generate the final and well-formatted document. The advantage of this approach is, that the style and appearance can be easily changed by set of instructions which affects the document immediately and (maybe) globally.
The document regardless whether it is a book or article can be split in different files including sub folders. Therefore, it is possible to create structure of folders and files to separate several concerns like chapters, paragraphs or appendixes. It has several packages which deals with many aspects of writing (e.g. graphics, math symbols). It's even possible to define your own commands which enables one to program and automate extensive tasks and simplifies the way one writes text. See the project site of LaTeX for more information.
There are many guides out there which explain in detail how to install LaTeX on your system. LaTeX is usually shipped in so-called distributions. MikTex is one of them and is available for Windows, Linux and macOS. Fully integrated editors with syntax highlighting and autocompletion are also available. (for example TeXstudio or TEXMAKER). Integrated Development Editors(IDE) like VSCode can be used in conjunction with LaTeX extensions. Despite the claims above that LaTeX is written in plain text, there are indeed WYSIWYG editors available (for example LyX).
LaTeX can also be used in virtualized environments like Docker containers. On how to use Docker containers with LaTeX, please see chapter Docker and VSCode.
All LaTeX code is written in files ending with .tex.
Some code also resides in .sty files, but that's just a small portion of LaTeX projects.
In less complex projects, it can be sufficient to have all the text in one single tex file.
But for bigger projects, it makes sense to split the content to more files.
This is useful to keep the context as clean as possible.
It also makes editing much easier.
Therefore, this project is also split in different files.
Every chapter resides in a separate sub folder. The chapter's TeX file is named after the chapter's title (e.g. introduction.tex for the introduction chapter). The advantage is that with this approach every chapter can be compiled separately. This greatly reduces compilation times, and it might be useful to ``publish'' single chapters if necessary. Then, the main document main.tex combines all chapters by including the according subfolders. If necessary, a chapter can also be split into two or more sub folders.
Images are put into a separate sub folder named 'img' next to the TeX file.
To ensure proper scaling, drawings like hieroglyphs etc. shall be stored as
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).
SVGs are not natively supported by LaTeX.
Therefore, they have to be converted.
The script ConvertFrom-Svg.ps1 can be used to make the conversion.
Usage: ConvertFrom-Svg.ps1 -SvgFiles <path/to/file.svg>.
This will produce a PDF named path/to/file.pdf.
Other images like photos and such should be stored as JPG.
Formats like PNGs are discouraged since there pictures take a lot of space and
have to be converted by LaTeX during the compile process which might be very time-consuming.
This project uses BibLaTeX to organize and display all used sourced and references. Even though the chapters are split into several files, all referenced are maintained in the single file references.bib.
The tex files should have a maximum of 100 characters per line. Exceptions are allowed if and only if the reading of the code would suffer from wrapping the lines (e.g. when using tables with many columns which exceed the limit). Every sentence starts in a new line. This makes it easier to read the document line by line. The real line wrapping etc. is done by LaTeX anyway. As always, readability should be the most important criterion when writing the text.
Simple tree structure featuring two chapters namely Introduction and reading order with image files:
- introduction
- introduction.tex
- img
- maya-vase.svg
- noble-shell.svg
- reading-order
- reading-order.tex
- img
- palenque-tablet.svg
There are some files like scripts which have a special function inside the project. Here's a short summary:
- document-version.tex: The current version of the document as it is used for a possible release. Managed by Edit-DocumentVersion.ps1.
- preamble.sty: Entry point for everything LaTeX in this project. Includes used LaTeX libraries and defines some settings used in the document.
- maya.sty: Library for Maya specific LaTeX command (e.g. hieroglyph commands etc.)
- references.bib: All references used by BibLaTeX.