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Getting Started

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Alfred Holmes edited this page Oct 1, 2023 · 9 revisions

Install the prerequisites

To use the LaTeX-Zettel you need to have the following software installed

  1. Python (version 3.x)
  2. python pip for installing required python packages in requirements.txt
  3. pdflatex for pdf rendering and make4ht for html rendering. TeXLive, which contains these, is available here.
  4. (Optional) Graphviz and pygraphviz for network visualization, on windows this may require the installation of various visual studio SDKs to install pygraphviz

Clone the repository

Once you have installed the prerequisites, you can clone the github repository to use LaTeX-Zettel. Once there has been a release it will be available in a more convenient format. To clone the repository use

git clone https://github.com/alfredholmes/LaTeX-Zettel

or you can download the project as a zip archive.

Once downloaded, you can install the required python packages using

pip install -r requirements.txt

Description of Directories

At the moment the directory tree for the project looks like this:

/
- manage.py
LatexZettel/
    - __init__.py
    - analysis.py
    - database.py
    - files.py
config/
    - make4ht.cfg
projects/
    - my_project/
         - my_project.tex
notes/
template/
    - note.tex
    - preamble.tex
resources/
    - image.png

The LatexZettel folder defines a python package which is used by manage.py to interact with the slipbox notes.

The folder config is for custom LaTeX configuration files. At the moment there is only a config for make4ht that defines a fix for using the \label command at the top of a document so that the whole document can be referenced, rather than a specific theorem.

The folder projects contains projects, which are intended to be longer files which combine a collection of notes. To create a project run python manage.py newproject project_name. This will copy the template template/project.tex to projects/project_name/project_name.tex. With the \transclude command you can then compile a collection of notes into one document.

The notes file is where individual notes get stored. If you run the command

python manage.py newnote index

to create an index note in the slipbox, this will create the folder /notes/slipbox and create the file /notes/slipbox/index.tex which will just be a copy of /template/note.tex. It will also create the file notes/documents.tex which will contain the line

\externaldocument[Index-]{index}

This document gets included in the notes. The file /template/preamble.tex, which gets imported in the note files then imports this file and so the xr-hyper package can then setup referencing between notes. See Referencing Other Notes for more detail on how to make links between notes.

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