Introduction

This repo is a set of miscellanea that I would like to share with students, and followers in general, for wider benefit. You are welcome to fork, clone, modify, etc. (as indicated in the license). Each section of the following corresponds to a folder in the repo. The objectives of sharing this are:

1. giving motivation and inspiration to students to use the "power of text" through scripting. So, even if you do not benefit from the scripts in this repo, I hope you get motivated and inspired to write your own to automate your work.

2. spreading the benefit, since I am sure these scripts are beneficial for their own sake.

Backup

Some general scripts that I created to automate backups, even incremental.

Emacs

Here, I put Emacs related files, including of course my .emacs configuration file. Currently, I do not consider myself an expert in Emacs since I cannot customize everything fluently in LISP; you will find many very sophisticated .emacs files over the net. However, my .emacs file can be a good start for novices to Emacs.

Git

These are a set of miscellaneous scripts that I created to ease using git, including creating, deleting, etc. completely from the command line without signing into the web interface Github.

LaTeX

This is a set of LaTeX templates, scripts, and modules that I usually use to prepare my lecture notes and other documents. They can be very helpful for anyone composing similar documents.

BibTeX

Is a simple folder that accounts for an example for all students how to organize your library using the "power of text" to git rid of other software. The folder contains a bib file, along with pdfs. The bib file is your library that contains articles, books, etc. Each item has a key that should be informative, e.g., Yousef2017MethodSystemForComputer; and in case it has a pdf, it should be named Yousef2017MethodSystemForComputer.pdf. In addition, each item has a set of keywords that should help you in classifying your items. Keywords should be as clear as possible. When adding a keyword to a new item, it should be selected from the existing keywords (or add a new one). This is to avoid having two keywords with different spelling styles (e.g., Microcalcification and micro-calcification).

LaTeX-Lecture-Template

Contains the LaTeX template that I always use in preparing the lecture notes. If you compile the .tex file, you will get exactly the same pdf part (chapter 1 as a sample) of the Digital Design course.

LaTeX-Lecture-Template-Preparation-Script

This script is very beneficial for producing a lengthy document like the lecture notes. This script is to save the nonsense time and effort wasted in writing \chapter{} \section{} \includegraphics ... insanely many times for each chapter, section, figure, etc. You just need to have a directory of Graphics containing the graphics of each chapter, and a text file Sections.txt that contains the chapter and section titles both are in the folder LectureNotesDesitenationDirectory, to which all the latex code will be automatically generated when running the shell script. Now, run the shell script, and it will parse the folder Graphics and the titles file Sections.txt and will generate all the stuff for you. Of course, you can change the FrontMatterTemplate.tex and MainTemplate.tex as you like. After generating the LaTeX code under that folder, you can compile it to generate the pdf which contains all the chapter titles, section titles, and all the graphics.

LaTeX-Manuscript-Template

This section is still under preparation, so it will be sort of improvising. It is an example for a manuscript uses many LaTeX modules, e.g., Tikz, pgfplot, etc. I will leverage this section to give general advises to the technical writing in general and LaTeX in particular.

The folder contains a complete opensource LaTeX code of our (paper)[https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.05700] that is currently under review. The code contains many very beneficial aspects, including writing bilingually (English and Arabic), preparing all the figures in pgfplot and tikz, using organized bibtex, etc.

• Have your LaTeX files modular as if you write a code (LaTeX is exactly a code). For example, have each Section in a separate tex file to be \input in the main file, and so on...
• Isolate your preamble in, e.g., Preamble.tex and try to make it generic for other documents.
• Have a separate sub-folder, e.g., called Graphics, to include all images. If you have many figures coded in Tikz or pgfplots it is a good idea to have them under a separate folder, e.g., figures, for more organization.
• Be consistent in lower/upper case and naming conventions in everything including: names of files, labels of equations, figure, tables, etc.,
• For bilingual document (in particular Arabic-English), make sure to use XeTeX. The document will almost compile without any problem as if you are using PDFLaTeX. If you are using Emacs, just make sure to include (setq TeX-engine (quote xetex)) in your .emacs file.

LaTeX-Tree-Preparation

This is to compile ONLY those files in your local folder tree that are called by a particular LaTeX project, with (or without) preserving the directory structure. This is very helpful to isolate those files required for compilation, from other files.

Recording

Some general scripts that I created to automate recording my lectures on FCIHOCW. I did not upload the full list of scripts yet.