Writing grant proposals is a collaborative effort that requires the integration of contributions from many individuals. The use of an ASCII-based format like LATEX allows to coordinate the process via a source code control system like Git or Subversion, allowing the proposal writing team to concentrate on the contents rather than the mechanics of wrangling with text fragments and revisions. In fact the proposal package has evolved out of a series of collaborative proposal writing efforts, where large teams (up to 30 individuals from up to 20 sites) have written a 100- page proposal in three weeks (with over 2000 commits). Such collaborative writing sprints are impossible without a revision control system and a “semantic” document class that generates tables, charts, and deliverable lists from content markup and thus takes care of many of the routine tasks of keeping information consistent.
In the simplest case, just clone the repository, and extend your TEXINPUTS
environment variable so that it can find it. On a UNIX system something like the following
should work.
cd /path/to/your/setup
git clone https://github.com/KWARC/LaTeX-proposal
echo 'export BIBINPUTS = "$(BIBINPUTS):/path/to/your/setup/LaTeX-proposal//:"' >> ~/.bashrc
Of course you will have to replace /path/to/your/setup with a path appropriate to
your system. A simple git pull will update you to the newest version.
Then you can just copy one of the examples at LaTeX-proposal/*/examples/* to your
system and start editing (you should probably adapt the upper section of the
Makefile accordingly).
If you want to use the LaTeX proposal class in a revision control system for a larger group, read (far) below.
The LaTeX proposal class has been developed to "scratch my own itch" over many proposals and will likely be developed further driven by future proposals. It is still quite poorly documented (but see proposal.pdf, euproposal.pdf, and dfgproposal.pdf), and experimental in places. It should really be re-coded to be more uniform; but it works for me and saves me (and my friends who use it) a lot of work.
The proposal class is distributed under the terms of the LaTeX Project Public License from CTAN archives in directory macros/latex/base/lppl.txt. Either version 1.0 or, at your option, any later version.
As this is just a side project for me, please submit issues and feature requests to the issue tracker. Even better, improve the code and submit a pull request
The base proposal class supports many of the general elements of project proposals. It is optimized towards collaborating on writing project proposals. This class is intended to be specialized to particular funding bodies that have their own styles.
base: the base proposal class (documentation)dfg: the instance for Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (documentation, examples)eu: the instance for EU proposals (documentation, examples)etc: style files from the sTeX bundle added for convenience (only on GitHub, not on CTAN)lib: Makefiles for the management of self-documenting packagesbin: utilities, e.g. a script that makes GitHub issues from the deliverables of a proposal for project managment if the proposal is granted.
The best way to write a collaborative proposal is to use a revision control system. It is
usually a good idea to make this repository into an external sub-repository that can be
updated as necessary. In the instructions below we assume that you - as the paper repos
maintainer - want to add the proposal classes as a sub-repository at path
lib/LaTeX-proposal from the top of the paper repository.
is via the git-subrepo extension of git. Unfortunately this is not part of git
(yet). So you as the paper repos maintainer have to
install it first if you want to
install the proposal classes as a subrepos. Your users do not, they will get the subrepos
automatically on git clone or git pull.
- go to the top of your paper prehistory:
cd path/to/top(you can only make a "subrepo" from there) - add the LaTeX-proposal distribution repos as a "subrepo":
git subrepo clone [email protected]:KWARC/LaTeX-proposal.git LaTeX-proposal
Note that under git-subrepo the "external" is not updated automatically, a
maintainer has to "pull" it. This can be seen as a feature and not a bug (there is less of
a chance to break things).
- go to the top of your paper repository:
cd path/to/top(you can only pull from there) - pull the proposal classes repos as a "subrepo":
git subrepo pull LaTeX-proposal
To contribute changes back to the the LaTeX-proposal repository, you analogously do
- go to the top of your paper prehistory:
cd path/to/top(you can only push from there) - do the push:
git subrepo push LaTeX-proposal
easypeasy!
is via git subtree.
- go to the top of your paper repository:
cd path/to/top - add the LaTeX-proposal repos as a remote:
git remote add LaTeX-proposal [email protected]:KWARC/LaTeX-proposal.gitunder the nameLaTex-proposal. - add the remote
LaTeX-proposalas a subtree:git subtree add --prefix=LaTeX-proposal LaTeX-proposal master --squash(here under the pathLaTeX-proposal). The--squashreduces history noise.
When you want to update the subrepository to the newest version, you have to "subtree pull" as above:
- go to the top of your paper repository:
cd path/to/top - subtree-pull:
git subtree pull --prefix=LaTeX-proposal LaTeX-proposal master --squashthis is a bit inconvenient, but works well.
Contributing back to the LaTeX-proposal repository is somewhat more complex; RTFM!
In a subversion repository you can must make an external by
- go to the top of your paper prehistory:
cd path/to/top - make the
libsubdir if necessary:mkdir lib - add the external:
svn propedit svn:externals lib - an editor will appear, add the line
LaTeX-proposal LaTeX-proposal https://github.com/KWARC/LaTeX-proposal/trunk - commit your work:
svn commit -m'adding external for the LaTeX-proposal '
Note that in SVN any svn update will update the LaTeX-proposal repository in the
external as well.