Starting a New Document
When you click the button in the toolbar to begin a new document a dialog appears, asking which type of template you would like to use to write your document. The default choices are:
Empty document
Letter
Book
Article
Report
If you selected an Empty document, you can either start writing a document from scratch, or you can use the wizard to quickly start a new document (see the section called “QuickStart Wizard”).
Frequent users of LATEX typically use the same preamble for almost every document they use. Templates can be created, saved and loaded within Kile to make it easier to start a new document.
To create a new template, you must first either open a TEX / LATEX file, or create a file of your own. Kile can generate a template from an existing document by opening the desired document and selecting ->.
When creating a new document by selecting a template from ->, certain character combinations will be replaced by data such as your name, or the character encoding your are using. These variables can be configured in ->.
When designing your own template, it is useful to known which character combinations are replaced by which template variables:
$$AUTHOR$$: This string
will be replaced by the author variable.
$$DOCUMENTCLASSOPTIONS$$: This string will be replaced
by the documentclass options variable. Typically this is used as follows:
\documentclass[$$DOCUMENTCLASSOPTIONS$$]{article}.
$$INPUTENCODING$$: If the
inputencoding variable is set to, say, latin1 this string is replaced by
\input[latin1]{inputenc}.
The easiest way to create a new template is to start the wizard, and then add commands in the editor. Once you have your document set up the way you like:
Save your file;
Go to ;
Choose ;
Make any corrections necessary to the template;
Enter a name for your new template;
Click to add your template to the menu.
Next time you start up a new document, you will be able to choose your customised template instead of the default ones.
A template can be created from any LATEX file. If you are looking for an easy way to configure a template, go find one you like on the internet and follow the same steps listed in the section called “Create a Template from the Wizard”.
For istance, you may want to create a full-fledged A0 poster. These posters are usually seen
at scientific conferences, and LATEX will help you making an attractive, catchy poster. You can get a
template for A0 posters at Jonathan Marchini's
home page, but many more are available. Remember that you will need the a0poster
package, which is normally not in a standard teTEX installation, so you will have to
download it,
copy it to a TEX folder, for example /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/a0poster/, and
run texhash so that LATEX will know that is exists. Do not forget
setting the file permissions so that everybody can read the file.
