Eisvogel: A clean pandoc LaTeX template with a focus on computer science | Hacker News Reader

Eisvogel: A clean pandoc LaTeX template with a focus on computer science

github.com

164 pointsgvand20 comments

Very interesting not only for professors but also for students as myself. I had a similar workflow for my assignments using Markdown and pandoc but this template is better in so many ways that I may change my workflow.

For those that want to try this without the manual and painful installation process I found that pandocker[1] supports this template.

[1] https://github.com/dalibo/pandocker

While I really like the colours (reminds me of Nord[0]), wouldn't it be better to use a serif font? Most researchers I know still read research papers on actual paper, where serif fonts seem to be preferred.

[0]: https://github.com/arcticicestudio/nord

I'd agree on the use of serif, but not on the majority of researchers reading research papers on actual paper. Even on screen (and esp. on a good e-reader), I'm still more used to reading serif fonts in research papers.

If I'm going to do more than scan the introduction, I always print a paper. My comprehensive is significantly higher than reading on a screen.

If it's under eight pages I print it out so that it's easier on my eyes.

I bought a cheap Brother black-and-white two-sided laser printer in college, along with a high-capacity toner cartridge. Use a high-quality stapler to put 3 staples along the left margin. I have printed many thousands of pages of articles. I can't recommend this highly enough.

I finally got my hands on some decent e-ink readers (the HD Kobos, when they still had a micro sdcard slot), and it's pretty pleasant to read papers (particularly in natural/external light) using KOreader[0], without having to deal with physically printing them out.

[0] https://koreader.rocks/

I used to, but in the last few years I don't think I've printed out anything.

I'd like to do my notes in markdown, but as a maths/cs student there's a lot of structure in the data (proofs, lemmas, intermezzos, sidenotes) that would be lost should I go down (eheh) the markdown route. I've been using Pollen [1] (you can think of it as LaTeX for web programmable in Racket and without cool typesetting, so yeah, not like LaTeX at all), but I wouldn't mind something more elegant and readable in plain text.

How do you (would you, did you) take your notes in college?

[1] http://pollenpub.com

My notes in college followed this route. I would take notes during lecture with pen on paper - less distracting, less likely to go wrong, lighter, and battery life was not a concern. (Today, I would likely take notes with a stylus on a tablet.)

When I sat down to revise my notes, part of that revision was to type them up in Emacs with org-mode, using embedded LaTeX for any notation that was not natively supported in org-mode. I would frequently already have typed notes from my readings, and I could integrate the lecture notes with these. I would render to PDF and print these out for further study away from the computer.

Part of the reason for this is that I found having access to the Internet and my collection of computer games was distracting when I was trying to study. Being able to print out the notes, share them with friends, study without having to haul around a laptop, find power, or navigate with a keyboard in the silent study floor of the library was important.

Last semester when I had a course where scribing for notes was required, I would first write down everything in pen and paper. And then transcribe them into LaTeX with Overleaf. This two part process was pretty effective: get the basic ideas first, then look for extra resources as supplements and then combine them together into a single note.

looks nice, will try it out

For my usecase, I started from default pandoc+xelatex output and customized step by step searching on stackoverflow/tex.stackexchange for things like font, page size, link color, styling inline code, chapter breaks, bullet styling, pdf properties, etc [1]

[1] https://learnbyexample.github.io/tutorial/ebook-generation/c...

looks good, but the licence is a strange pick for a template... as i understand the wording, you'll have to add the licence even if you make a PDF.

> Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

> [...]

> Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,

Nice, but how well does it deal with corner cases, e.g. listings that run over multiple pages, or lines that are too long?

It's all there, waiting at the tips of your fingers, just try it out?

Prediction: OP won't try it out because it's unlikely the template will solve his issues and playing around with new things is generally a waste of time. So if you (tlamponi) have some interest in promoting this template, then answering the question would be helpful! Everyone reading this submission is already aware that they could find things out by trying the template out, but it is not as easy and straight-forward as you make it out to be.

> OP won't try it out because it's unlikely the template will solve his issues

His general issues in life? maybe not. But honestly, that's a bit of a big thing to ask from a pandoc template. So OP asked for it, implying that he's interested in such things, but generally has issues with long lines in such templates. So interest is there, it may even correlate with the fact that he has a setup with most of the tools needed installed.

> playing around with new things is generally a waste of time

What? I'm thankfully that a lot people do not think this way, else we'd be still in the stone age.

> So if you (tlamponi) have some interest in promoting this template

no interest whatsoever, not related to it in anyway. But I have an interest that people try easy things out, instead of speculating on negative or positive possibilities of said things, which, in fact, is a waste of time.

> but it is not as easy and straight-forward as you make it out to be.

# package-manager install git pandoc

# cd $(mktemp -d)

# git clone https://github.com/Wandmalfarbe/pandoc-latex-template.git

# cd pandoc-latex-template/examples

# echo "Example for waste of time: 'Prediction: OP won't try it out because it's unlikely the template will solve his issues and playing around with new things is generally a waste of time. So if you (tlamponi) have some interest in promoting this template, then answering the question would be helpful! Everyone reading this submission is already aware that they could find things out by trying the template out, but it is not as easy and straight-forward as you make it out to be.'" >> basic-example/basic-example.md

# sh build-examples.sh

# okular basic-example/basic-example.pdf

Ah yes, very very hard. Sorry for trying to convince someone to work out answers they're interested in their self, such a useless thing to do in life.

Anyway, it seems that it does cope well with long lines, be it in a common text paragraph, but also in a code block, here it breaks those lines, intends the overflowing one - together with the fact that there are line numbers everything is clear and easy to read. Single thing, if I copy those broken up code lines, they do not get copied as a single line, this is a bit of a bummer to me, but may not be an issue for others..

Tangentially (looking at the example), have people created Lorem Ipsum generators for code?

I’ve been using this for internal work documents for quite a while, and I’ve been very happy with the workflow, and the look of the docs has been well received.

Beautiful!

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