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What the hell is going on?

As we push into the blisteringly bright and scary world of latex, you may find yourself asking... "what the hell is going on". Or perhaps "I'm not a coder, how am I supposed to contribute?". Here's an extremely brief tutorial on the basic building blocks we're working with here, and tools you can get to follow along:

We're on Github!

Github comes with a whole host of features, like embedded issue trackers and project management tools. But the most important thing that comes with github is that it's a git repo, a programmatic construct built to be super easy to copy, fork, make changes to, and later maybe merge those changes back in.

What do you need? You'll need a Git client of some sort. If you're using Windows, I recommend you get your hands on the Github Desktop. It's clean, it does its job, and it integrates directly into github and your github account.

We're using Latex!

Latex is a special language compared to what you may be used to (document formats like .docx files or google docs). The editors that come packaged with most operating systems are "What You See Is What You Get" editors: they show you a constantly updating look at what your document would look like if it were printed.

Latex is a "What You See Is What You Mean" language: it directly describes the content, organizations and layouts that you want to impose on the document. These can then be rendered or 'compiled' into the final document: it's why there are over 150 little .tex files here that all combine into one single PDF! Each .tex file is its own little atom of semantic content (like a mech or a chapter), and the final .tex file at the top puts it all together.

What do you need? Grab Atom. It's a pretty decent editor, and it directly integrates with github in a ton of really convenient ways.

You'll also need to install a few things:

• Get your hands on a copy of Latex. I recommend Miktex.
• If you grab Miktex, you'll want to install the "latexmk" package from its internal package manager.
• Then, grab the Latex Atom package.
• You might as well also grab the Latex highlighting Atom package too.
• If you are running Linux, you may be missing the Arial font that LANCER uses.
  • Install the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package on Ubuntu/Debian, or whatever is equivalent on your distro.

I have the stuff. Now what?

You're gonna have to clone the repo, make changes, and then make a pull request.

Consider this section of the guide incomplete: you can always poke me (Winged) on the Lancer discord for direct assistance, or google around on the internet for general guides.