simple-paper

simple-paper is a script that creates a PDF from a set of markdown files. It's accomplished using Pandoc. Pandoc is great and very flexible, but that flexibility requires some configuration. simple-paper makes some assumptions about your configuration to let you start writing quickly.

Most markdown extensions from pandoc are enabled and simple-paper should work fine for many academic papers. Details can be found in the Pandoc user guide. Extensions include:

• BibTeX bibliography
• Figures
• Footnotes
• Latex Math
• List of references
• Multiple citation formats with custom CSL
• Pictures
• Table of contents

boilerplate.pdf was created using simple-paper, see boilerplate/ for source.

Installing and updating

For simple-paper to work make sure you meet it's prerequisits. To install you just need to paste the line below. It will download simple-paper to /usr/local/bin/simple-paper and make it executable.

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/antonklava/simple-paper/master/simple-paper && sudo mv simple-paper /usr/local/bin/ && sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/simple-paper

New paper

Once you have simple-paper installed you can run the command below to setup a new paper from the boilerplate. This will download and unpack a zip-file from Github containing the boilerplate contents.

simple-paper new my-thesis # new from boilerplate
cd my-thesis
simple-paper # creates my-thesis.pdf

Ordering chapters

simple-paper will use all files ending in .md as part of the document, including in subdirectories. They are then ordered, so it's preferable to name your files 1-introduction.md, 2-background.md etc.

If a chapter is too big for a single file you can create a directory and name your files 1-introduction/1-abbreviations.md, 1-introduction/2-background.md and so on.

Prerequisits

You need Pandoc, Pandoc-citeproc, Pandoc-crossref and some latex engine installed.

OS X

Assuming you have Homebrew, installing this on OS X can look like this:

brew update
brew install haskell-stack
stack install pandoc pandoc-citeproc pandoc-crossref
brew cask install mactex

You may have to update your $PATH to find the latex binaries (I had to add /usr/local/texlive/2015/bin/x86_64-darwin).

Debian/Ubuntu

The full TeX install is huge (3GB) so make sure you dont run this on a too small vm. Apt will probably get you a pretty old version of pandoc so it's preferable to install using stack. That will also let you get pandoc-crossref easily.

Install Stack, the haskell package-manager from here: https://www.stackage.org/stack

sudo apt-get install texlive-full
stack install pandoc pandoc-citeproc pandoc-crossref

Acknowledgements

Cat picture in boilerplate by Henry Riley, https://flic.kr/p/u98GdN

Changelog

• 2016-02-15: Changed prerequisits, added pandoc-crossref.
• 2016-02-01: Initial version