Shen's LaTeX Essay Template

This is my LaTeX Essay Template. It is a best-in-class LuaLaTeX template for writing essays, dissertations, documents, and papers in the academic humanities. It includes a custom LaTeX documentclass called humanize, which is based off the article class, and contains all of the custom styling and configuration.

Features

This template uses a number of advanced LaTeX features.

• Complete PDF/A-3u Compatibility, for Archival Grade Documents.
• Fully Reproducible Builds for PDF Compilation, using Makefile.
• Custom Microtype Protrusion Settings for Hanging Punctuation.
• Typography Tweaks, Adjustments, and Custom Headers and Footers.
• BibLaTeX Integration for Citation Management

Quickstart

This git repository is set as a template. Simply clone the template, and begin. The root document is located at ./latex/paper.tex. The documentclass, \Title, \Author, and \Date fields can be modified there.

To compile the document, simply run make:

make

Documentation

This template is broadly organized into two directories. sections contain the body of the text. figures contains additional templates for figures, diagrams, and graphs.

.
├── collage-4.jpg
├── latex
│   ├── figures
│   │   └── template-*.tex
│   ├── humanize.cls
│   ├── betterprotrusionboundary.lua
│   ├── configuration.tex
│   ├── mt-protrusion.cfg
│   ├── citations.bib
│   ├── paper.pdf
│   ├── paper.tex
│   ├── paper.xmpdata
│   ├── makefile
│   └── sections
│       ├── body.tex
│       └── endpage.tex
├── LICENSE.md
├── makefile
└── README.md

The body of the text is meant to be included in the ./latex/sections directory. Begin writing in ./latex/sections/body.tex, and add additional sections within that directory (e.g. ./latex/sections/introduction.tex).

Metadata for the PDF must be configured in the ./latex/paper.xmpdata file. This file is read by the pdfx package, and information within is used to generate a valid, standard-conformant PDF/A-3u document.

The header, footer, and additional packages can be configured in ./latex/configurations.tex. Biblatex, as well as a set of commonly used packages for mathematics and sciences are included as comments.

Dependencies

This template depends on the following programs:

• GNU Make: Used for the makefile for compiling the PDF document
• Latexmk: Tool used with Make to run LaTeX for the correct number of runs.
• LuaLaTeX: The default typesetting engine used.
• Microtype version >= 3.0. This template uses advanced protrusion features only available in recent versions of microtype.

Related documentation

For an overview of how to populate biblatex citations.bib files, visit the biblatex-mla manual at CTAN.

• https://www.ctan.org/pkg/biblatex-mla

GPLv3 License

The raw template itself is licensed under the terms of the GPL (version 3). A full copy of the license is attached in LICENSE.md. Naturally, any works that you create using this template (i.e. any actual essays you write using it) will be your own intellectual property.