Tags: projects, latex, research

« Previous post: Pushing to all git remotes with one … — Next post: Rendering 3D polyhedra and meshes using … »

After defending my thesis last year, I wanted to show my newfound admiration for all things LaTeX. Since I spent a lot of time getting the formatting just right for my purposes (following typographical advice of numerous sources), I decided to create some LaTeX packages for research-based documents.

latex-mimore

latex-mimore is a minimal and modern template for reports, such as the ones you have to do for a seminar. You can also use the class for longer documents, such as a bachelor’s thesis, but I would recommend using latex-mimosis, which I describe below. If you clone the repository and set up your LaTeX environment correctly, using the class is as easy as writing

\documentclass{mimore}

as the preamble to your document. Please take a look at the GitHub repository for more details. This is what a document looks like if formatted with latex-mimore.

latex-mimosis

latex-mimosis is the bigger sibling of latex-mimore. It is meant for your Ph.D. dissertation thesis, your master’s thesis, or your bachelor’s thesis. Again, using it is as easy as adding

\documentclass{mimosis}

to your preamble. Please take a look at the GitHub repository for more details. This is what a document looks like if formatted with latex-mimosis.

Design considerations

Both packages have been carefully crafted. They aim to be…

• clean: there is no LaTeX trickery involved; the page is neatly divided using standard typesetting practices. Adjustments to the defaults are documented and make sense. At least to me.
• minimal: there are no unnecessary adjustments of anything in there, no spurious decorations. The layout is inspired by Robert Bringhurst and his ideas about typography. You can also detect a hint of Edward Tufte in there, even though I am not such a big fan of the layout in his books; at least not for my own dissertation.
• modern: the template should be pleasing to the eye, without any of the cruft that is a remnant of typewriter times.

The templates are released under an MIT licence and I would love to hear your feedback about them. If anything is missing or can be improved, please open an issue in the corresponding repository.

Happy TeXing, until next time!