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Philosophy

• KISS.
• Easy to use.
• Organized, elegant, coherent and consistent.
• Compact, but not crowded.
• Compatible with latexmk and pdflatex
• No exotic or discontinued packages.

Features

• A page to include information about the authors.
• A page to include a license.
• Automatic generation of a bibtex cite.
• "Executive overview" page (sometimes required in University Degrees adhered to ABET).
• A page to cite your own papers as a result of the project.
• An acknowledgements page and a dedication page.
• Automatic Table of Contents (ToC), List of Figures (LoF) and List of Tables (LoT).
• Two-column bibliography and glossary.
• Support for appendices.
• Templates for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are included in Appendix C if required.

Customisation

• Details about you and your work are defined in `main.tex'. Fill it in according to your thesis. The document will automatically update all occurrences, including a bibtex citation!
• The title page can be easily configured by editing opening/titlepage.tex.
• Fill in information about the authors in opening/about.tex.
• Edit opening/acknowledgements.tex and opening/dedication.tex as you wish.
• Include your abstract in one or more languages in opening/abstract.tex.
• Chapter and appendix numbers on the page margins can be problematic for printing. They can be disabled by uncommenting a few lines in the \fancypagestyle{chapters} and \fancypagestyle{addenda} page styles in style/alcazar.sty.
• The default text font is Libertinus Serif, but you can change this in style/pkgs.sty. Other high quality options I recommend are Charter and Source Serif Pro, although you may need to change the font size from 12 pt to 11 pt.
• The default sans serif is Open Sans. Good alternatives are Inter and Source Sans Pro.
• The default monospace font is IBM Plex Mono. Good alternatives are Fira Mono and Inconsolata, although the size of the monospace font family should be adjusted.

Build

Requirements

• biber for biblatex,
• python 3 and the pygments package for the minted package.

Important information

• This project can be built with latexmk or pdflatex, although I greatly encourage the use of latexmk. Below are examples of compilation commands with some recommended arguments. The -shell-escape flag is required for the minted package.

• This project is configured to automatically output all the auxiliary build files into the same ./output/ folder, including the final PDF.

Using latexmk

Simply use:

latexmk -shell-escape -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode -file-line-error -pdf outdir=./output/ main.tex

This project uses a latexmkrc file to fix the makeglossaries tool when using a subfolder for saving build outputs.

Using pdflatex

This method has problems with using a subfolder for build outputs. For this reason, it is recommended to execute pdflatex without setting an -output-directory=:

pdflatex -shell-escape -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode -file-line-error main
biber main
makeglossaries main
pdflatex -shell-escape -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode -file-line-error main
pdflatex -shell-escape -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode -file-line-error main

Makefile

A Makefile is already included, which invokes latexmk.

Overleaf

Download this repo as a .zip file, then upload the file to Overleaf as a new project. Although Overleaf uses latexmk, the minted package will send an error regarding the output folder. To fix this, you need to remove the outputdir=output setting from the minted package import in style/pkgs.sty.

LaTeX Workshop by James Yu (extension for VS Code / Codium)

latexmk recipe

Works with the default latexmk recipe almost out of the box. Some settings need to to be changed:

"latex-workshop.latex.autoBuild.run": "never",
"latex-workshop.intellisense.citation.backend": "biblatex",
"latex-workshop.latex.outDir": "%DIR%/output"

Creating a new pdflatex recipe

To compile using biber and makeglossaries with pdflatex you need to add the following tools to your .vscode/settings.json configuration file, under the section latex-workshop.latex.tools (In the UI, navigate to Latex-workshop > Latex: Recipes > Edit in settings.json):

{
    "name": "biber",
    "command": "biber",
    "args": [
        "%DOC%"
    ],
},
{
    "name": "makeglossaries",
    "command": "makeglossaries",
    "args": [
        "%DOCFILE%"
    ],
}

Edit the pdflatex entry as follows to include the -shell-escape argument:

{
    "name": "pdflatex",
    "command": "pdflatex",
    "args": [
        "-shell-escape",
        "-synctex=1",
        "-interaction=nonstopmode",
        "-file-line-error",
        "%DOC%"
    ],
    "env": {}
}

Now add a new recipe, under latex-workshop.latex.recipes (to generate the configuration section from the UI, go to Latex-workshop > Latex: Tools > Edit in settings.json):

{
    "name": "alcazar",
    "tools": [
        "pdflatex",
        "makeglossaries",
        "biber",
        "pdflatex",
        "pdflatex"
    ]
}

And run the alcazar recipe.

Note: If you keep getting a makeglossaries error saying that main.aux could not be found, set the latex-workshop.latex.autoBuild.cleanAndRetry.enabled setting to false (in the UI, uncheck "Latex-workshop > Latex > AutoBuild > Clean and retry: Enabled")

File structure

The file structure of Alcázar is simple and self-explanatory:

./
├── bibliography/               # BIBLIOGRAPHY
|   ├── bibliography.tex        # Bibliography generation
|   └── references.bib          # BibTeX references
|
├── figures/                    # Put your figures here
|
├── glossary/                   # GLOSSARY
|   ├── glossary.sty            # Glossary definitions
|   └── glossary.tex            # Glossary generation
|
├── opening/                    # OPENING
|   ├── resources/              # Graphics used in the opening (logos, etc)
|   |
|   ├── about.tex               # Details about the authors
|   ├── abstract.tex            # Abstract, in various languages
|   ├── acknowledgements.tex    # Acknowledgements
|   ├── dedication.tex          # Dedication
|   ├── opening.tex             # Structures the opening part of the document
|   └── publications.tex        # Your publications. Optional, comment line in opening.tex
|   └── titlepage.tex           # Title page
|
├── style/                      # STYLE
|   ├── alcazar.sty             # Style definition and configuration
|   ├── colors.sty              # Colors definition
|   └── pkgs.sty                # Only used to import packages
|
├── text/                       # TEXT
|   ├── appendix/               # Put your addendum here
|   |   ├── appendix.tex        # Appendix generation
|   |   └── thanks.tex          # Say thanks. Optional, comment line in main.tex
|   |
|   └── chapters/               # Put your chapters here
|
└── main.tex                    # The main document.

Thanks!

Alcázar was born as a personal project to replace the poor quality report templates I encountered throughout my academic life. It continued to grow until it made sense to create a comprehensive template. I have learned a lot during the development of Alcázar.

Thanks to my friends and colleagues who beta-tested Alcázar. You found many bugs, made excellent suggestions and inspired me a lot.

And to all the people who have already used Alcázar, I hope I have helped you despite my questionable LaTeX skills!

Credits / citation

If you use and like this template, please consider giving credit :)

@misc{alcazar-latex-template,
  author = {Del Pino Mena, Juan},
  title = {Alcazar: A free and Open-Source LaTeX template for academic works},
  url = {https://github.com/dpmj/alcazar}
}

There is already a small acknowledgement in opening/license.tex below the license text. It's completely optional, of course ;)

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Disclaimer

This work is not affiliated with any institution, and the references, logos, and the like are merely examples of usage. All third-party resources included in this repository are the property of their respective owners and are provided for convenience only.