(Technical) Report Template

#1

Hello all,

I recently started using TeXmacs and I really like its ease of use for drafting good-looking templates. However, I’ve encountered two major issues preventing me from using it for my (non-formal) academic submissions:

  1. Suitable Template
    Most templates are for academic journals (IEEE, ACM, etc.) with a predefined structure (Title, Abstract, etc.). Where everything is on one page. The book format fixes this somehow, but leaves a lot of blank pages in between. It’s really challenging to craft a functioning template that fits the style guides of my institution.

Example of a Technical Report structure:

  • Title page (there’s a bug(?) where the page number shows on the first page, with a hacky workaround to remove it: Cover page: no numbering, no header/footer)
  • Executive Summary
  • Table of Contents
  • Body
  • References

While I can basically piece these pages together manually, TeXmacs’ functions are quite strictly predefined. For instance, inserting a title and hitting enter automatically adds “by” before the author field. While it’s possible to change this through macro modification, I’m struggling to work around elements like the abstract section.

  1. No APA (7) Reference Style
    I’ve managed to build a somewhat working APA 7 style that displays references correctly in the automatically generated bibliography. However, I’m unable to properly modify the style for the cite command.

I wish my institution didn’t insist on APA (I find it rather unreadable), but it’s a hard requirement for grading. Consequently, I still need to use LaTeX. On the positive side, adjusting spacing and margins is straightforward and easy in TeXmacs.

As a newcomer, I find it rather hard to locate the proper places for functions, styles, etc. Using .scm, .ts, .tm, etc. is quite confusing in the beginning. It took me a few days to get used to how TeXmacs behaves, yet I still couldn’t manage to get it properly working for my needs.

Questions:

  1. Does anybody have a working (technical) report template I can reuse?
  2. Does anybody have a working APA 7 implementation, especially for the cite command?

Thank you for your help!

#2

Hi @dash003 and welcome to the forum.

For the cite command, you might start looking at the recent thread Creating a bibliography style

I did not test it but it seems sensible, so you might use the same way to prepare your own style; one might do some small changes with respect to the suggestions in the post, but we can look at it in case you are interested. If you need support for writing the Scheme code, you can ask here.