Papyrxis Workspace

A LaTeX workspace for writing books and papers the way you want to write them. Not a framework, not magic — just organized components and a build system that stays out of the way.

What it does

• Keeps LaTeX components modular so you can swap or extend anything
• Builds PDFs with a single make command
• Lets you override only what you need, without touching the rest
• Handles versioning from git tags
• Ships GitHub Actions workflows for publishing releases

Requirements

• TeX Live (full) or MiKTeX
• Bash 4+, Make, Git
• Python 3 + PyYAML (pip install pyyaml)

Starting a project

mkdir my-book && cd my-book
git init
git submodule add https://github.com/papyrxis/workspace.git
bash workspace/src/init.sh

That's it. The script asks a few questions and sets up everything.

Building

make          # build
make watch    # auto-rebuild when you save
make clean    # remove build artifacts
make sync     # re-sync .pxis/ after editing workspace.yml

Directory layout

my-book/
├── workspace/          ← submodule (this repo)
├── workspace.yml       ← your configuration
├── main.tex            ← document entry point
├── Makefile
├── parts/              ← book chapters (books only)
├── frontmatter/        ← title, preface, copyright
├── backmatter/
├── sections/           ← article sections (articles only)
├── figures/
├── references/
│   └── main.bib
├── configs/            ← your component overrides
└── .pxis/              ← auto-generated, don't edit

Configuration

Everything lives in workspace.yml. Key settings:

project:
  type: book            # book | article
  title: "My Title"
  author: "Your Name"
  url: "https://github.com/you/repo"

build:
  source: main.tex      # which .tex file to compile
  engine: pdflatex

Run make sync after any change to workspace.yml.

See examples/workspace.config.yml for all options.

Overriding components

Put your .tex files in configs/. Any file whose name matches a component replaces that component. mode: extend appends your file after the default instead.

overrides:
  dir: "configs"
  mode: replace         # or: extend

Example: to customize colors, create configs/colors.tex. Done.

Adding structure (books)

make part    ARGS='-n 1 -t "Part One"'
make chapter ARGS='-p 1 -c 1 -t "Getting Started"'

Bibliography

Default style is authoryear with footnote citations. Use \autocite{key} for footnotes, \textcite{key} for "Author (year)" in text. \printbibliography goes at the end.

For numeric citations, override bibliography.tex in your configs/.

Releasing

After make sync (with .pxis/ committed), tag and push:

git tag v1.0.0
git push --tags

The included workflow builds your PDF and publishes a GitHub Release automatically. A rolling pre-release draft is also built on every push to main.

See .github/workflows/ in your project after init.