Report

How to use

You need to have the full TeXLive suit (or MacTeX) to be able to create these LaTeX documents. Some notes on requirements:

• The documents are compiled with LuaLaTeX, Biber and BibTeX.
• You'll use latexmk to continuously build the document(s).

Configure latexmk

Create a new file in $HOME called .latexmkrc:

# Use LuaLaTeX
$lualatex='lualatex -interaction=nonstopmode -synctex=1 %O %S';
$preview_continuous_mode = 1;
# BibTeX with LuaLaTeX
$bibtex_use = 2;
# Create PDFs with LuaLaTeX
$pdf_mode = 4;
# TODO: Switch based on OS
$pdf_previewer = 'open -a skim';
# Remove SyncTeX generated stuff
@generated_exts = (@generated_exts, 'synctex.gz');

Please note the TODO, either comment out the line below or configure it to open a PDF reader of your preference. On macos I recommend Skim, while on Linux I recommend zathura. For this, simply change 'open -a skim' to zathura.

Run latexmk

Now you should be ready, simply run latexmk <filename> in your terminal and everything will start compiling for you and will open the created PDF file.

Editing

You do you, there are a thousand different editors for LaTeX. There are however some tips I can come with:

1. The style I personally prefer for references in BibTeX are <authorLastName><year><FirstWordFromTitle>. Personal preference obviously. The reference style used in this report is the IEEE style, which is the most prevalent one within computer science.
2. Labels are really useful, use them within sections, for figures, images and so on.
3. Don't commit the generated PDF until you are finished with it, Git doesn't work very well with blobs so it ends up tracking each commited version of the file, causing the size of the repository to become stupid large.