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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 copy-and-paste-ready bibtex citation!
• The title page can be easily configured by editing opening/titlepage.tex. Include here your faculty's logos.
• Fill in information about the authors in opening/about.tex. You can include here a photography of the authors.
• Edit opening/acknowledgements.tex and opening/dedication.tex as you like!
• 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 commenting/uncommenting a few lines of code in style/alcazar.sty, under the \fancypagestyle{chapters} and \fancypagestyle{addenda} styles.

Fonts

The default font is Libertinus Serif plus Libertinus Sans.

You can change this in style/pkgs.sty. Other high quality options I recommend are Source Serif Pro plus Source Sans Pro. The template handles well a Sans-Serif font as base font of the whole document, with Source Sans Pro and Inter being two good options.

The default monospace font is IBM Plex Mono. Equally good alternatives are Fira Mono and Inconsolata.

All these options appear as commented lines in style/pkgs.sty, with the correct font scale and options already prepared.

Build

Requirements

• biber for biblatex,
• python 3 and pygments 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. With latexmk both biber and makeglossaries should run automatically.

A Makefile is already included, which invokes latexmk. To compile, simply run make in the project's root directory. Run make clean to remove all auxiliary files.

Using latexmk

This project does not need a latexmkrc file.

latexmk -shell-escape -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode -file-line-error -pdf main    

Using pdflatex

Run:

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

Sometimes an additional call to pdflatex may be necessary.

Overleaf

Download this repo as a .zip file, then upload the file to Overleaf as a new project. It should work out of the box.

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

Recipes and tools for the latexmk and pdflatex recipes are already provided in .vscode/settings.json. Alcázar should compile out of the box with the default latexmk recipe. However, manual configuration is described below, if needed:

latexmk recipe

Works with the default latexmk recipe out of the box. These settings are recommeded:

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

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 text in opening/license.tex below the document license. 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.