qu-handout: Course Handout LaTeX Class and Template

This is a LaTeX template for making simple handouts for courses or other technical purposes.

Example Output

See the example PDF output included in this repository.

Dependencies

This template requires a number of packages, each loaded in the qu-handout.cls file. Most notably, the Queen's standard font is the free font Open Sans, which this template incorporates by using the opensans package. If you prefer a different font, you can do that in the qu-handout.cls by changing the appropriate lines.

Code and Syntax Highlighting

This template includes functionality for syntax highlighting of code snippets using the minted package. Overleaf has a nice introduction to minted.

Minted requires the installation of additional software, Pygments. Section 2.1 of the minted documentation describes how to install Pygments. If you use macOS, the easiest way is probably to just install Pygments using Homebrew.

When running LaTeX and using minted, you must invoke it with the -shell-escape flag so that it can access Pygments. For example, if you are using Visual Studio Code as an IDE with the LaTeX Workshop extension and compile your document using latexmk, then you can edit the settings.json file to include the flag, as shown in the example snippet below.

"latex-workshop.latex.tools":[
    {
        "name": "latexmk",
        "command": "latexmk",
        "args": [
            "-shell-escape",
            "-synctex=1",
            "-interaction=nonstopmode",
            "-file-line-error",
            "-pdf",
            "-outdir=%OUTDIR%",
            "%DOC%"
        ],
        "env": {}
    },

If you do not need this functionality, then you can simply comment out these lines shown below in the qu-handout.cls file and be sure to not use minted commands in your document.

% For code (usually Python or C/C++)
\RequirePackage[]{minted}
\setminted[python]{linenos=true}
\setminted[c]{linenos=true}
\renewcommand\theFancyVerbLine{\sffamily\footnotesize\arabic{FancyVerbLine}}
\BeforeBeginEnvironment{minted}{\begin{snugshade}}
\AfterEndEnvironment{minted}{\end{snugshade}}
\newcommand*{\mintpy}[1]{\mintinline[bgcolor=shadecolor]{python}{#1}}
\newcommand*{\mintc}[1]{\mintinline[bgcolor=shadecolor]{c}{#1}}

Contact the Author

Joshua Marshall, PhD, PEng
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Queen's University
Kingston, ON K7L 3N6 Canada
+1 (613) 533-2921
joshua.marshall@queensu.ca

License

The code associated with this class and template is subject to an MIT License.