Beginning with LaTeX

During an earlier university course I was using the software package R Studio for one of the data analysis courses and that was my first exposure with \LaTeX{}. I’d heard about it previously and it was always on my radar as something to try out, especially given my obsession enthusiasm with markdown.

So, this week, I finally jumped in and for the most important and critical of reasons: a new DnD campaign! What a perfect reason to dive in, the styling for any tabletop RPG is incredibly important to give a feel for the world that the players are inhabiting so having a rich, typeset character sheet and background was very appealing.

Beginner Tutorial

I started off with the aptly-named LaTeX Tutorial and worked through the examples. It was reasonably basic and the layout and progression of the different tutorial articles made getting to grips with the typesetting system very easy.

Upon completion though, it was hard to know how to progress from there to some of the beautiful layouts that you can scroll through online.

MikTex

I trialled it on my work computer at first during lunch breaks and used the MikTex package (package manager? I’m still not sure of the correct terms) along with the amazingly presented DND 5e LaTeX Template.

It took me a few tries to get everything working but I was very surprised and impressed by how little I needed to change from the example.tex file (copied, obviously, and reworked for my characters background) in order to get something presentable.

The wealth of different styles and implementations of various components (sorry, classes) of the document is staggering and I had a great time putting together just the two simple pages of character background that I had.

For Future

This won’t be the only time I’ll use this system, not by a long shot. I’ve got a couple of other personal projects that this would be amazing for and I like the idea of starting to build up a library of styles and settings that I can reuse in the future.

My goal over the next few weeks is to look in to how I can integrate some of the personal project information into LaTeX templates programmatically (probably using Python).

Helpful Commands

A couple of very helpful commands that I used in spacing out my first documents were:

  • \bigskip: This was used for adding some whitespace between two paragraphs, specifically between normal text and a subparagraph style from the DND 5e LaTeX Template. \smallskip and \medskip are also available.
  • \begin{DndReadAloud}: I used this command (again, not sure I’ve got the right terminology here) to make a cool insert or two with some flavour information for my character. This is specific to the same template, but was the start of me exploring a little more how the different parts of the .tex file can be created and moulded to suit.
  • \frontmatter / \mainmatter: Using these two commands in conjunction to get different page numbering styles and, after a long time, to get the chapter numbering to work.