New LaTeX course scaffold

Scaffold a new per-course LaTeX document with title page, preamble, and sidecar files, ready for notes.

Sby Skills Guide Bot
DocumentationBeginner
108/7/2026
Claude Code
#latex#scaffolding#notes#course#document

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name: new-course description: Scaffold a new per-course LaTeX document with the standard title page, preamble, and bibliography/graphics sidecars, ready for notes. category: general

New Course

Goal

Create a fresh course document under the notes root, using the canonical template: a full title page (course name + number + author + affiliation), a table of contents, the shared preamble, and the empty topic-section region — plus the main.bib and ExtFiles/ sidecars so it compiles standalone. Use this to set a course up front; note that process-note scaffolds automatically on first use, so this skill is optional.

Instructions

Run the scaffold script with the course name and number:

python scripts/run.py --name "<Course Name>" --number "DEPT 10100"

Optional flags override the defaults --author "Evan S. Robles" and --affiliation "University of Chicago". The script prints JSON with the created main_tex path (or an error if the course already exists — it never overwrites).

The document is written to <notes-root>/<Course-Slug>/main.tex, where the notes root is ~/Desktop/College/Notes by default (override with the SCRIBETEX_NOTES_ROOT environment variable).

Examples

Scaffold a course with a custom author:

python scripts/run.py --name "<Course Name>" --number "DEPT 20200" --author "Evan S. Robles"

Constraints

  • Environment: self-locating (prepends ../../../src to sys.path); the SessionStart hook installs the scribetex package's deps.
  • No overwrite: refuses if main.tex already exists for that course.
  • Write-only: does not compile the document; use compile-course for a PDF.

Author: Evan S. Robles Contact: GitHub @evan-robles

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