LaTeX Tutorial Template

Everything needed to start a new tutorial.

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Copy this folder, rename four things, and start writing.

1. Copy and rename

cp -r LaTeX-Tutorial-Template "My-New-Tutorial"
cd "My-New-Tutorial"

Then rename the source file to your title. The name has to match exactly, because .latexmkrc and .gitignore both refer to it:

Now	Becomes
tutorial.tex	<Your Title>.tex
README-template.md	README.md
cover.tex	stays cover.tex

2. Point the config files at the new name

Open .latexmkrc and .gitignore and replace the placeholder in each:

.latexmkrc :  @default_files = ("<Your Title>.tex");
.gitignore :  <Your Title>.pdf

Never use *.pdf in .gitignore. cover.pdf is a source file and has to stay in the repository. Only the built book goes in, by its exact name.

3. Fill in the title page

The top of <Your Title>.tex:

\title{...}
\author{...}          % usually the GitHub name, Oct0pu5
\date{...}            % release or revision date
\version{1.0}
\extrainfo{``<a quotation, printed at the foot of the title page>''}

4. Draw the cover

cover.tex is a TikZ drawing that compiles on its own. The skeleton there is an empty canvas with a frame and coordinate axes; put something in the middle that represents your subject.

The three covers that exist are worth looking at first:

Tutorial	Cover
Convex Optimization	contour ellipses with two convergence paths, labelled GD and FISTA
Compressed Sensing	the measurement equation Y = ΦΨᵀX as a diagram
Linear Algebra	a grid sheared by a matrix, with the standard basis and the columns of A

xelatex cover.tex      # produces cover.pdf

Keep the aspect ratio near 1.45. The title page scales the image to the full page width, so a much taller or wider drawing will not fit with the title below it.

5. Write the README

README-template.md has the structure filled in, with guidance comments that do not render. Rename it to README.md, then delete the comments as you go.

The section worth real effort is Contents. Give every chapter three to five lines of honest description. It is what a reader uses to decide whether to read on, and the easiest section to write badly.

6. Build

latexmk

One command. It picks XeLaTeX and runs as many passes as the cross-references need.

A full TeX Live installation is required, not a minimal one, because elegantbook loads ctex and fontspec.

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What is in here

File	Purpose
tutorial.tex	the document skeleton: preface, one chapter with its overview, afterwords
cover.tex	the cover drawing, compiles standalone
README-template.md	README template with guidance, renamed to README.md when you start
.latexmkrc	makes a bare latexmk build correctly
.gitignore	the twelve build artifacts, plus the built PDF
elegantbook.cls	the document class. It must travel with the repository — it is not installed on the system
CLAUDE.md	the revision guide, for working on an existing tutorial rather than a new one
LICENSE	CC BY-SA 4.0

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Revising an existing tutorial

The body prose is written by hand. CLAUDE.md is for working on what is already there: restructuring, copyediting, and bringing a document up to the standard.

Copy it into the repository you are revising:

cp CLAUDE.md "/path/to/Some-Tutorial/CLAUDE.md"

It records the standard every tutorial conforms to, the ten-step revision procedure, how to measure whether new prose matches the author's voice, and every trap the migrations have hit so far — the lost \captionsetup, the missed \paragraph level, the leftover \newpage after each chapter, the Chinese that renders as blank. With it sitting in the repository, those rules load automatically and do not have to be restated.

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License

Released under CC BY-SA 4.0. See LICENSE.