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Templates

Templates are predefined document structures that dictate the overall layout, style, and organization of your final document. TeXSmith includes several built-in templates for common document types, and you can also create and use custom templates.

Use a template

TeXSmith provides some templates out of the box to help you get started with common document types. You can specify a template using the --template (or -t) option followed by the template name.

texsmith document.md --template article

Listing Available Templates

To see the list of available templates, use the --list-templates flag:

➜ uv run texsmith --list-templates
                           Available Templates
┌──────────┬─────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Name     │ Origin  │ Location                                          │
├──────────┼─────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ article  │ builtin │ /home/ycr/texsmith/src/texsmith/templates/article │
│ book     │ builtin │ /home/ycr/texsmith/src/texsmith/templates/book    │
│ letter   │ builtin │ /home/ycr/texsmith/src/texsmith/templates/letter  │
│ snippet  │ builtin │ /home/ycr/texsmith/src/texsmith/templates/snippet │
└──────────┴─────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Each template comes with its own set of slots, styles, and configurations tailored for specific document types. For example, the article template is suitable for academic papers, while the book template is designed for longer documents with chapters and parts.

Explore Template Details

You can inspect the details of a specific template using the --template-info flag. This command provides information about the template's metadata, slots, attributes, and assets.

texsmith --template article --template-info

It will display a summary of the template, including:

  • List of attributes and their types (e.g., authors, columns, date, language...)
  • List of assets included in the template (e.g. style files, images...)
  • List of fragments (ts-geometry, ts-typesetting, ...) that the template uses.
  • List of slots available for content injection.

Scaffolding Custom Templates

One goal of TeXSmith is to make it easy to create and share custom templates. You can scaffold a new template by copying an existing one and modifying it to suit your needs. Use the --template-scaffold flag to copy a template to a local directory:

texsmith --template article --template-scaffold my-custom-template/

Then edit the files in my-custom-template/ to customize the layout, styles, and slots as needed, and use your custom template by specifying its path:

texsmith document.md --template ./my-custom-template/