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Since my first year at university I have written in LaTeX: lecture notes in Neovim, a thesis kept as a repository with releases, and my product's documents, whose figures come from data.
As of 03.11.2026, from the repositories
Notes
In my first year I started taking mathematics notes on a laptop: by hand it was slow, Word cannot keep up with formulas, and the notes my classmates kept in Notion were not enough for me. The first attempts are lost; the repository starts with the second year.
A note is written in Neovim. vimtex builds the PDF, and LuaSnip expands abbreviations as I type: ff becomes a fraction, ;e an epsilon, and <= the sign ⩽ that Russian texts use. The config has 139 snippets: 132 expand by themselves, 44 work only inside formulas.
Below is line 259 of calculus lecture 17, 19.11.2023, typed again with the same snippets. The PDF updates when I leave insert mode and press ␣c: the file is saved and built once.
les-17.tex
Если $E \subset \R^{n} $ и $\forall \epsilon > 0 \ \exists B = B_{\epsilon } : \ E \subset B$ и $m(B) < \epsilon \implies m(E) = 0$.
NORMALpressed Esc ␣ ckeys 99 · characters 132
master.pdf
Pages
From September 2023 to June 2025 the repository holds 8 sets of lecture notes, 263 pages, and 14 collections for exams and tests, 367 pages. 64 figures are drawn in Inkscape and placed in the PDF with labels set by LaTeX itself.
My group prepared for exams with these notes and collections, and so did younger students when they reached the same subjects.
In the dark theme the pages are recoloured as Zathura showed them with my Catppuccin config.
Origin
This is how Gilles Castel took notes: in 2019 he described typing mathematics lectures in Vim and drawing their figures in Inkscape. Elijan Mastnak turned it into a detailed guide to the setup. I spent months building my config from their writing and looked for answers on Reddit: there were no agents to do it for me then.
From them the config has vimtex with LuaSnip, the layout of its files, the rules of the triggers and the preamble of the first notes. Mine are the colours of the boxes around definitions and theorems, the Russian names with their snippets, the lecture's date from the lesson command, ⩽ and ⩾ in place of ≤ and ≥, and a Russian dictionary. For this setup I moved from Windows to macOS, and installed Arch Linux on my home computer.
In my fourth year I wrote to the guide's author, showed him pictures of my setup and thanked him. He replied.
Gilles Castel
Mathematics PhD student at KU Leuven
Died on 18 July 2022. Source
As of 03.11.2026 castel.dev does not open: the links lead to the archive.
Elijan Mastnak
Author of a guide to LaTeX in Vim and Neovim
The guide opens with a link to Castel's article.
Thesis
I kept my graduation thesis as a repository: the text in .tex files, built by LuaLaTeX through latexmk, the university's requirements in a file of their own that the preamble follows. The topic: “Development of the client applications of the VCourse SaaS platform for managing teaching schedules”.
The requirements are set once: A4, margins of 2, 2, 3 and 1 cm, 14 points, 1.5 spacing, a 1.25 cm indent. That is five lines, and all 130 pages take their look from them. The bibliography follows GOST 7.0.5 without BibTeX, and the title page is built from a file of data.
Move the lens over the page: its source lies under it, paragraph for paragraph.
\documentclass[14pt,a4paper,oneside]{extarticle}\setmainfont{CMU Serif}\usepackage[a4paper, top=2cm, bottom=2cm, left=3cm, right=1cm]{geometry}\onehalfspacing\setlength{\parindent}{1.25cm}
Releases
make release checks that everything is committed, builds the PDF and puts a tag with the date. The tag starts GitHub Actions: the PDF is built in a container with a full TeX Live and attached to the release, and the link to the latest one stays the same.
Each release below is a real PDF from GitHub. On 22 May the screenshots of the apps went in: the file grew from 391 KB to 21.2 MB in one release.
v2026.06.10
130pages
make releasechecks that everything is committed and builds the PDFgit tag vYYYY.MM.DDa tag with the date goes to GitHubbuild-pdf.ymlthe tag starts the buildtexlive/texlive:latesta full TeX Live with CMU Serif, the command make buildbachelor-thesis.pdfthe PDF is attached to the releaseDocuments
Pora na paru has many documents that live longer than a week: registers of universities and colleges, overviews, policies. I refused to keep them in Word or in a tracker's editor, and since 30 September 2026 they are a LaTeX repository.
One class gives every document its look, and a type is told by its label, not by a colour: overview, status report, policy, register, brief, agreement. Tables and figures are never typed by hand: a document asks the data for them in document.json, and under every table the build prints the day the data was checked and where it came from.
Every document has a level of access, and the build will not let a document take a column or a source of a more closed level. An issued version goes into a journal with the hash of its PDF: different content cannot be issued under the same number.
document.json
"by-city": {
"dataset": "example",
"table": "organizations",
"caption": "По городам",
"pivot": {
"by": "city",
"total": true,
"values": [
{ "key": "organizations", "count": true },
{ "key": "universities", "count": true,
"filter": { "kind": "university" } },
{ "key": "students", "sum": "students" },
{ "key": "per-organization",
"ratio": ["students", "organizations"] }
]
},
"sort": ["-students", "by"]
}
Checks
The registers are collected by Claude Code agents: they go through official sites and bring, for every fact, the address of the page and a verbatim quote. The repository itself was written with Claude Code too, in all 433 commits.
An agent's word is not taken. A script fetches every page itself and looks for the quote and the value on it, a person settles what is in doubt, and only the import writes to the data.
LaTeX finishes without an error even when the PDF is already broken. So the build is held by 11 checks and 465 tests: it fails on a letter the font does not have, on a line wider than its column by more than 2 pt, on an undefined reference and on a font not embedded in the PDF.
collect_verify.py
ok the quote and the value are on the page
values-on-page the quote is not word for word, but the values are on the page
quote-not-on-page the quote is not on the page
value-not-on-page the value is not on the page
page-empty the page is empty or did not come
tls the machine does not trust the site's certificate, and the check is never switched off
no-url no address of a page
no-quote no quote
quality.py
a letter the font does not have
a line wider than its column by more than 2 pt
an undefined reference or citation
a font not found or substituted
LaTeX asks for another run
a font not embedded in the PDF