proScientia.ltx offers a set of configuration- and template-files that allow scholars to do humanities research work on the base of LaTeX, BibLaTeX, Biber, and Jabref. The visible result of these tools, the respective configuration files and content files follow the style of (German) classical philology, German studies and (German) history.

By using this tool, I’ve written the proScientia manifest Über hilfreiche Anmerkungsapparate.

Objectives

proScientia.ltx delivers a complete set of BibLaTex-, LaTeX- und Makefiles to

  1. to search for secondary literature,
  2. to maintain the bibliographic data,
  3. to generate ‚abstracts‘ und excerpts
  4. to write one’s own scientific work.

The outstanding feature of the proScientia.ltx is to manage quotations via footnotes in accordance with the classical (German) philological standard.

Examples for this kind of document are humanities, Demo in German, Demo in English

Installation

Prerequisites:

  • a LaTeX distribution with different packages/programs which should be part of your TeX-Distribution including BibLaTeX, Biber, biblatex-dw, Koma-Script
  • Beside your preferred LaTeX editor you need the tools bash and make

URLS:

Initialization:

  1. Clone the proScientia.ltx repository via git clone https://github.com/kreincke/proScientia.ltx (or download and extract the respective tarball)
  2. Open a shell, change into the proScientia.ltx directory and
    • Select a project identifier YOURPRJ that does not contain blanks or slashes
    • execute chmod 755 bin/collprj.sh
    • execute collprj.sh YOURPRJ [de|en]
    • move the created project directory to any other working place
  3. change into the created project directory
  4. callmaketo verify that the system is running
  5. open and close you JabRef version once.
  6. call find $HOME -type f | grep jabref | grep customizedBiblatexTypes to determine, where your JabRef configuration files are stored
  7. copy cfg/jabref-prefs.xml to $HOME/.java/.userPrefs/org/jabref/prefs.xml (or wherever your systems stores the general JabRef configurations)
  8. copy cfg/jabref-customizedBibLatexTypes-prefs.xml to $HOME/.java/.userPrefs/org/jabref/customizedBiblatexTypes/prefs.xml (or wherever your systems stores the BibLatex literature specifications)

Do your library work:

  • Change into the created project directory
  • Update the file tools/search.tex in accordance with your needs.
  • cd tools && make search.pdf
  • Do your library research work as you planned it in tools/search.tex
  • Incorporate the bibliographic data into bib/lit.main.bib by using jabref or any other text editor
  • In case you evaluate a web document, download the PDF files under proofs/BIBTEXKEY.pdf
  • copy extracts/extract.md to extract/BIBTEXKEY.md
  • read and excerpt the secondary literature in the respective file

Write your work:

  • Edit / update your frame tex file proScientia.tex
  • Create your snippets by copying snippets/inc.snippet.tex to snippets/inc.YOURCHOICE.tex and edit the files
  • Integrate the snippets by using the LaTeX command \input{snippets/inc.YOURCHOICE.tex}
  • Open a shell and type make proScientia.pdf to create a human-readable version of your scientific work.

If you want to rename the frame, also update the Makefile. If you want to see how the writing work can be done and how the result looks, read Demo in English or the proScientia.ltx manifest. If helpful, study the respective sources under proScientia.ltx/humanities

proScientia.ltx is distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license. Details are described in the README file.

© 2020 Karsten Reincke, Germany. Published under the terms of the Creative Commons Share Alike license