As part of my aspirations to become the best possible programmer I can be and as part of bringing new skills into my repertoire, I ventured into the land of LaTeX for documenting. Instead of writing in some made-up plain text format every time I write something down, I decided it would be sensible to use a proven interim format that’ll allow me to convert — easily, mind — into whatever format might be needed: markdown, HTML or wiki, for example.
So in steps LaTeX. On a murky Monday morning at my new job, I fire up gVim and find an example on the web. Two hours later I have documented the basics of the framework I’m coding for and can produce it in whatever format I need (and neatly, too). Suffice to say I’m hooked.
The hacker in me says “so you need a quick and easy way of producing skeleton LaTeX documents at the touch of a button or two”. In steps BaSH: I just echo this basic LaTeX document to stdout and be done with it:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\begin{document}
\author{Alex Collins}
\title{}
\maketitle{}
\begin{abstract}
\end{abstract}
\section{Enter Section Name}
\end{document}
Now I’m always ready to go when needing the power and simplicity of LaTeX without having to remember the barebones.
