Document Templates

(nb. Files with a .ltx extension may be processed through LaTeX. Those with a .tex are not complete documents, and must be \input’ed into a .ltx document.)

Envelope Template: A template for printing envelopes for business letters.

Wilkes Letterhead: This fits a letter onto Wilkes Letterhead. It can place a “fax to: …” box at the top of the page and can generate the Wilkes letterhead masthead. In addition, it is easy to adjust the margin and the separation between the inside address, salutation, etc., to fit letters of different lengths.   (example)

Personal Letterhead: A template for personal letterhead. Similar to the Wilkes letterhead above, it can create a “fax to …” box, and the margins and component separation are easy to adjust for short letters.   (letter example,   fax example)

Committee Minutes: A template for committee minutes. One perk of using LaTeX for this is that creating the attendance list only requires commenting/uncommenting the membership list. (pdf)

Printer Labels:   For typesetting address labels, etc.
    1×2⁵⁄₈”, for a 10×3 grid on 8½×11” paper
    2×4”, for a 5×2 grid


EG_Report.tex: The basis for the example reports in the Organic Lab Manual. To set these off from the lab protocols, the base font is \texttt, and euler was used for the “handwritten” portions. While I like the effect, using a math font for text necessitated a degree of sausage-making. Requires the eulertext package below.

Course Schedule: After years of cursing as I created my syllabus using an MSWD table, I decided to do it right. With this LaTeX file, it is now trivial to shift material from one week to another (as, for example, Thanksgiving moves around). In addition, the week numbers and MWF tags are generated automatically. (pdf)

Attendance, Doodlesheet, and LabDoodles are three scratch-sheets to keep attendance or to organize scores before they are entered into Excel. Essentially, they are grids with student names on each row and the columns either unlabeled (doodlesheets) or marked with the week of the semester (attendance sheet). Note that all three require the fontsize package below. (PDFs: Attendance, Doodlesheet, LabDoodles.)

Instrument Signup Sheet: A generic time-of-day by day-of-week grid, on which users can reserve a laboratory instrument. The non-trivial part: uncommenting appropriate switches in the LaTeX file will reserve blocks of time for teaching-labs. (Compare no labs with MTTh labs.)

User-Rules with Tear-Off Stub: A template for user-rules for an instrument with a tear-off stub. The document prints on legal paper, but, once the signed stub is torn off and submitted, the remaining part with the rules is 8½ × 11. (pdf)

Photo Grid Prepares a composite of photographs from individual photo files. The photos scale automatically depending on the page-size (letter, legal, 11×17) and number of columns selected. (pdf)

Packages

cpdnbr automates the assignment of compound numbers in a chemical paper (eg, “Ketone 5 was treated with…”). Numbers can be recalled using \ref{label}-style commands. Letters and other modifiers (“5a”, “6-¹³C”) are supported but must be entered manually. Numbers are printed in two user-definable formats (eg, bold normal-font and bold sans-serif), the latter for use in equations, figures, etc.

cyr Allows quick-and-dirty typesetting of Cyrillic text, through the wncy fonts included in the amsfonts package. This package allows the use of the standard LaTeX font commands: \emph, \textbf, \small, etc.  In addition, the package allows Russian text to be typed in Cyrillic, rather than requiring transliterated input. Required font-description files: zip archive

draftcopy-HAT: A tweak on Juergen Vollmer’s draftcopy package, this places the “DRAFT – DRAFT – DRAFT” ribbon at the top of the page, rather than the bottom. (nb. This package requires draftcopy.cfg from the original package.)

EulerText uses the Euler math font as a “handwritten text” font. Requires some rather inelegant kludges for certain symbols.

fontsize allows the default font size to be set to 7, 8, 9 or 14pt, in addition to the standard sizes (10, 11, 12pt). Also defines smaller and larger environments to ratchet a block of text down or up one size. This was written before I discovered the extsizes package.

gapped-ul.sty underlines text, but leaves a gap in the underlining for letters and symbols that extend below the baseline (p, q, etc.). Supports “old style figures” that descend below the baseline. Not a particularly robust script.

lwords: Similar to Patrick Happel’s lipsum package, this provides Lorem Ipsum dummy-text, but as individual words rather than as full paragraphs. The words may be lower-case, capitalized, all-caps, or in “sentence format.”

mpar tweaks the width and placement of margin paragraphs so that they work nicely with margins set by the geometry package.

refs formats references for inclusion in footnotes. It tries to be intelligent about which fields are (or are not) present — volume number, editor, edition, article title, etc. — and adjusts punctuation accordingly. It has options for ACS, Chicago, APA and MLA formatting. Examples (pdf)

url-HAT: A trivial tweak on Donald Arseneau’s url package (v3.4), this kerns the slashes of “http://foo.bar” more tightly than the monospaced default.

Misc

Makefile processes figures and equations:
1) It converts /tmp/foo.ps into an .eps or cropped .pdf file, for inclusion in a LaTeX document.
2) It converts /tmp/foo.ltx into foo.pdf, which can be pasted in a ChemDraw, MSWD, or other document.
This second use duplicates that of Pierre Chantelier’s LaTeXiT, but the resulting graphic is a smaller file.  make help for details.

detex: Open-Detex may be downloaded from GoogleCode. Here are my tweakings to the detex.l file of the source-code; these allow the program recognize additional LaTeX commands and characters (M- and N-dashes, arrows, \$, etc).

HunSpell glitch: I switched from ispell to hunspell because the latter supports utf8-encoded documents. Inconveniently, hunspell occasionally gets freaked by the '' at the end of a LaTeX quotation, and begins ignoring passages when checking documents. This may be remedied by using ” rather than '' as a closing quotation-mark, but the curly mark is not transparent to LaTeX’s intersentence spacing mechanism the way '' is.
 → Solution: set its spacing-factor code to 0 within the preamble: \sfcode"11 0   (This may also require \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}, depending on the font.)

RainbowText: A somewhat silly document that prints adjacent letters of a textblock in different colors. (Written as a proof-of-concept exercise.)

Vim-LaTeX Suite: See the notes in the File Type Plugins section of the Vim page.

Documents

2014 NMR Conference Program: The program for a conference hosted by the department in May 2014. Perhaps of interest to anyone else putting together a conference program? Lots of procrastination clearly went into this. (pdf)

Senior Award Call and Certificates: A “mail merge” that produces a letter for each entry in a contacts list, and another “merge” that produces an award certificate for each entry in an awardee list. (Examples: certificates, Letters)