SSU LaTeX Template

LaTeX Template and BibLaTeX bibliography style for Southampton Solent University reports.

Why use LaTeX?

Formatting in Microsoft Word (and other document editors) is notoriously painful. LaTeX separates concerns by defining the layout as code, meaning you can focus on the content of your work without messing things up.

It can also parse exported references into the document in the Solent-Harvard format, and will work with tools like RefWorks or Zotero.

Disclaimer

Every effort has been made to ensure that this template accurately produces documents in the required format. However, responsibility lies with the user in the event that it produces incorrectly formatted or corrupted content.

Therefore, it is strongly advised that:

• Document generation is tested at the earliest possible stage (LaTeX can take a long time to install).
• Generated content is tested and proofread prior to submission.

Usage

Headings

You can define headings at levels one through four, as follows:

1. /chapter{chapter name}
2. /section{section name}
3. /subsection{subsection name}
4. /subsubsection{subsubsection name}

Paragraphs

Write paragraphs in plaintext, separated by newlines:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam auctor diam augue, at fermentum mauris cursus eget.

Fusce mauris dolor, egestas quis molestie ac, semper et libero. Pellentesque varius eros in dui porta suscipit.

Images

To insert an image, use the following code block:

\begin{center}

    \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{your_image}
    \captionof{figure}{Example image}

\end{center}

In the example above:

• LaTeX looks for an image called your_image.png in the ./images/ folder.
• The figure has the caption "Figure X.X: Example image".

Note: This repository's .gitignore ignores images by default. If you want to include them in version control, omit images/*.

Referencing & Citations

Supported Sources

Solent-Harvard style requires custom drivers for each type of source. These exist for the following source types:

• Online Sources (@online)
• Books (@book)
• Conference papers (@inproceedings)
• Journal Articles (@article)
• Standards & others (@misc)

References

References go in the refs.bib file in BibTeX format. You can generate these with a reference management tool such as RefWorks or Zotero.

References in this file will be automatically formatted and parsed into the document upon creation.

Citations

Use \cite{id} anywhere in your document to cite a source.

When the author name is in the text, use \citeyear{id} to exclude the author name from the citation.

Code Blocks

The minted package can be used to automatically highlight code, but there are some prerequisites if you are doing this locally. For this reason, it is disabled by default, but can be enabled by uncommenting the following lines in master.tex:

% Code
% \usepackage{minted}

Then, you will need to set up the pygments syntax highlighter. Assuming you have Python 3 installed, the following commands will do this (depending on your OS).

1. python3 -m /path/to/venv
2. source /path/to/venv/bin/activate
3. pip install pygments

You will need to re-run the second command to activate the virtual environment every time you close the terminal.

Then, you can add minted blocks which typically look something like this:

\begin{minted}[linenos,breaklines]{<your_programming_language>}
    <your_code_here>
\end{minted}

However, there are lots of other options. More information is available on Overleaf.

Other Elements

The guides listed below explain how to implement some other common typesetting features, courtesy of Overleaf.

• Tables
• Footnotes
• Cross-referencing
• Glossary

Generating a PDF document

The easiest way to use LaTeX is with Overleaf—just import a copy of the template. Alternatively, you can install it locally on Linux or Windows. Below are instructions for local installations.

Linux & Windows

1. Install LaTeX.

2. To generate master.pdf, open a terminal and run the command below:

   pdflatex master.tex
   

3. If you are using BibLaTeX, run biber after pdflatex and then re-run it:

   biber master && pdflatex master.tex
   

Software license

This template is software licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. This license establishes different rules for software and content, which are explained in more detail below:

• You cannot use the template code itself (software) for commercial purposes.
• You can use the generated PDF/DOCX document (content) for any purpose, including commercial applications, without attribution.
• If you redistribute the template code (software), you must attribute the original source and retain the existing license.