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PaperBuilder

Build a latex paper with IISER Mohali logo and superb formatting with just Markdown

Usage

All usage is explained as in interactive mode. CLI Mode is the same as interactive mode, except you must run as PaperBuilder command_with_params.

Open a Terminal

Windows

  1. Hit Win-X then i. This will open a powershell terminal.
  2. Run cd ~\Documents or some other location
  3. Run PaperBuilder --help. This should print a help screen

Linux - Default installation

  1. Start a terminal
  2. cd ~/Documents or some other location
  3. Run pprb --help. This should print a help screen

Non Standard installations

  1. Start a terminal
  2. cd ~/Documents or some other location
  3. run the \path\to\PaperBuilder.py --help. This should print a help screen

New project

Run PaperBuilder new new_project_path. Replace PaperBuilder with pprb for linux.

This creates a folder new_project_path in the cwd(Documents if you used the above location) and 2 files in it, content.md and bibliography.bib.

content.md is where you put your content. Markdown syntax is already available in the file. Once you have read it, clear it and put your content. Add the metadata.

bibliography.bib is where all your references go in bibtex format. Almost all websites allow you to download citations in bibtex. Cite as [@citationname] in content.md. For example, [@einstein] will cite the bibtex entry with name einstein

Build paper

This is where the magic happens.

Run PaperBuilder build_type path_to_project where build_type is one of the types in the table below. Replace PaperBuilder with pprb for linux.

And voila, if you’ve done everything correctly, you should have content.pdf in your project folder!

Incase you are unable to/don’t want to install latex, use the ltx* build types, which create a latex file content.tex which you can compile online using Overleaf. This is also useful if you want to make some changes to the Latex file directly.

Build Type Use Case
report An elaborate format for building talk reports/seminar reports
assign Simple format for assignments
ltxreport LaTeX file for report format
ltxassign LaTeX file for assign format
pdf same as report
latex same as ltxreport

See the Examples page for a sneak peak into how each format looks

The –extra option

In some cases you may need to send extra arguments to pandoc. For these use the --extra="Your args" option. Pandoc arguments can be found here Be careful of double quoting and spaces.

Example: PaperBuilder report test --extra="--pdf-engine=xelatex"

The default extras

For cases below, the default --extra is often enough. See Examples for a demo.

To use this, the following setup needs to be done

OS Change
Windows In MikTex Console, go to Packages, search for gyre and install both results.
Linux Install texlive-xetex using apt

Other Running options

These are not necessary for normal use. This is for debugging.