cheatsheet_tmplate

A template for writing a condensed cheatsheet for e.g. exams.

By default the sheet will be landscape and have 3 columns (content is automatically being distributed). You can change the columns in main.tex (condMulticols argument) and the orientation in main.sheet.tex (KOMAoptions -> paper option).

Assumptions / prerequisites

This section briefely states some dependencies and some information about the environment.

Packages

catppuccinPalette (used, but can be easily replaced)

Some colors being used come from the catppuccinPalette package (not published on CTAN, thus not possible contained in a TeXlive installation). You can either search for Cat<color> in main.sheet.tex and replace the colors, or build catpuccinPalette (or download the .sty from the current release) and place the resulting .sty in your tex path (or the project root directory).

TeX Engine

I personally am in favour of the LuaLaTeX engine and use it (almost exclusively) but for the functionallity it's not necessary to do so. The lua specific features from utils.lua (currently only auto generating some tables and draw packet headers) won't be available with engines without support for lua.

Just make sure to remove the \directlua calls from main.tex.

Build Script

I'm using cluttex for building LaTeX documents which allows to place all intermediate files cleanly into a directory (tex-aux) and not clutter the project's directory (hence the name). This script should be included in newer TeXLive installations but some features might be lacking (not used in the template right now).

You're free to use other tools like latexmk but you might want to adjust the Makefile accordingly.

Getting started

• clone the repository
• check dependencies (handle issues)
• read through preamble.tex, most importantly the NewDocumentCommand DeclareMathOperator NewDocumentEnvironment statements as using the provided commands/environments might be useful when writing the content.
• strip main.tex of everything you don't need (you might not need all otr even none of the generated tables)
• create a new section-file in sections/ (or copy the sections/example.tex), put your content there and add \input{sections/<your section-file name>} in main.tex (as shown with sections/example.tex).
• Also feel free to tamper with the preamble.tex as you want to, remove packets you don't need, add some etc. The ones contained there are more like a suggestion what might be useful.

Files

This section briefly goes over the files belonging to this template

main.script.tex

Compile via this file to build in script mode (more on that later).

main.sheet.tex

Compile via this file to build in cheatsheet mode (probably what you want when you're using this template).

preamble.tex

All (script/sheet independent) settings (loading packages and configuring them , defining macros/environments) are placed here.

main.tex

Root file for the content.

sections/

I'd recommend to place each section in a dedicated file (no preamble, just \section{new section}) and include these files with \input{sections/<filename>} in main.tex (see example with example section). This makes handling the tex code much more easier since the files don't get that large.

utils.lua (only when compiling with LuaLaTeX)

Contains some useful lua functions for automatically generating tables and packet haders. Have a look at the comment above the respective function (or the examples in the main.tex file) for usage of the individual function.

Notes on packets

nicematrix

• you might want to use the small option for matrices or set \setlength{\arraycolsep}{2pt} for more condensed matrices. If you want the latter one only for the bNiceMatrix environment, use

\usepackage{etoolbox}
\AtBeginEnvironment{bNiceMatrix}{\setlength{\arraycolsep}{2pt}}

(Credits to Kristi)

Collaboration

You're welcome so submit issues and/or PRs. Also feel free to chat about e.g. which packages (+options) you found helpful in the discussions. Especially if you decide on writing some more generating things with lua, I'd be very much interested so feel free to share.

Why is there a script mode / main.script.tex

The attempt is to be able to typeset the same content in a consensed form as well as in a form more nice/natural to read (portrait, bigger font, only one column etc).

To be honest I'm not using this very much on my own but it's there and you can even have small variations in the content (e.g. if you want to use some abbreviation on your cheatsheet to make a line fit one line in the output but want the script to be better readable) by using \ifscript{tex-code} and/or \ifsheet{tex-code}.