In this post I review the steps to setup LaTeX with its flavor LuaLaTeX, TeXStudio and Pandoc.
Texlive and others
Fedora provides different levels of TeXLive. From bare minimal to full. These common packages are texlive-scheme-basic, texlive-scheme-medium and texlive-scheme-full. Also there are the contex, gust, minimal and textex. I am starting wih the basic and installing packages as needed.
sudo dnf install pandoc texlive-scheme-basic texstudio
I used LuaLaTeX to create my resume and to write letters. The letters have an specific structure, eg. my and recipent information, topic, date and its content.
The templates require additional libraries and fonts. These are the following:
sudo dnf install texlive-tcolorbox texlive-fontawesome texlive-academicons texlive-silence texlive-sourcesanspro texlive-cormorantgaramond texlive-tex-gyre texlive-babel-german texlive-babel-spanish
To automate letters creation, eg. Job applications, I save the dynamic information in a Markdown file, in yaml format. This file is passed then to LuaLaTeX with Pandoc aid.
pandoc metadata.md --template letter_template.tex --pdf-engine=lualatex -o output.pdf
The code creates a pdf file (output.pdf) based in a latex template (letter_template.tex) and a yaml structure in markdown file format (metadata.md).
PDF edition
Some times I need to add or remove pages to a PDf file. For this purpose I use pdftk-java. It is an implementation available in Fedora from the pdftk program written in C.
Here is a use case example. I want to create a new file (output.pdf) that will have the pages 6 to 15 from the bigfile_with15pages.pdf file. The code to extract these pages is the following:
pdftk bigfile_with15pages.pdf cat 6-end output output.pdf
The comand uses the parameter cat to extract pages 6 to 15 from the bigfile_with15pages.pdf file. And it saves them in output.pdf
Other use case is the joining several pdf files. It is also achieved with the parameter cat. Here is an example:
pdftk resume.pdf certificates.pdf cat output resume_with_certificates.pdf
The command joints the files resume.pdf and certificates.pdf. They are joined in order of apperance. The parameter output generates the resume_with_certificates.pdf.
PDF file size
Reduce a pdf its size. it is playing with the image resolution. In the following example is setup for an image of 180-x 180 psi. With a jpeg compression of 40%.
convert -density 180x180 -quality 60 -compress jpeg base.pdf output_base.pdf