Get stuff done, out of the box

                     

Choose the style you desire from the visual cards. Each style option is spported with least-fuss code.
So you can concentrate on the content and presentation, without having to search all ove for code that works.

This is a shopfloor guide, an attempt to make LaTex accessible to a larger audience. It arises from a very personal realization that the LaTex ecosystem has become unwieldy. It is even dauting for most casual users. For every simple problem, there are innumerable accepted solutions, if not a choice of packages to sort it out. Users often end up spending more time on community websites than getting much real stuff done.

It is also an audacious attempt at a top-down approach to using LaTex. At least for casual users. What we propose here is visual cards for most common tasks. If the card is a fit with your mental map of what the content should look like, we provide the underlying code. It is not a purist view, I concede. But it will bail out many a casual user looking to get stuff done.

That preamble out of the way, don’t expect magic. I will attempt to walk you through the basic structure of a LaTex document, specifically the preamble, where the magic happens. This shopfloor kit should hopefully help you build a document from scratch--out of the box.

These pages won’t get into installation issues, which is the usual starting point for any DIY guide. Installation advice is a minefield. Nor will we attempt the power user stuff –such as maths and equations—in this iteration. Depending on the response, I will stack that up later.

To summarize: this is a shop floor kit to help you get a document up and running with the least hassle. Visual clues at each step will get you an advance feel of what the output will look like; choose wisely. Happy LaTex-ing.