LaTeX

What This Skill Does

The LaTeX skill enables OpenClaw to act as a technical typesetting assistant. It is designed to handle the complexities of the LaTeX markup language, ensuring that documents adhere to professional typesetting standards. This skill manages the entire workflow of document creation, including preamble configuration, package management, complex mathematical formatting, and floating object placement. Whether you are drafting a research paper, a technical manual, or a complex report, this skill ensures your output follows best practices like using booktabs for tables, proper hyphenation, and correct math mode syntax. It effectively bridges the gap between raw text and professionally compiled documents.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, run the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/ivangdavila/latex

Use Cases

• Drafting academic research papers: Automatically handles citations, references, and mathematical notation.
• Creating technical documentation: Ideal for software engineers needing to generate manuals with code snippets, diagrams, and cross-references.
• Formatting financial reports: Uses the booktabs package to create clean, readable tables without unnecessary vertical lines.
• Preparing presentations: Helps in structuring documents that can be adapted for Beamer slides.

Example Prompts

1. "Create a LaTeX template for a research paper that includes amsmath, hyperref, and microtype, with a predefined graphicspath for my figures folder."
2. "Help me rewrite this table using booktabs syntax, removing all vertical lines and using toprule, midrule, and bottomrule."
3. "I have an overfull hbox error in my abstract, how can I fix this while maintaining professional typography?"

Tips & Limitations

• Typography: Always use double backticks (``) for opening quotes and double single quotes ('') for closing to ensure the correct stylistic glyphs.
• Math Mode: Remember that display equations should use the \[ ... \] syntax or an equation environment. Never use straight quotes in math; use \text{} for explanatory text.
• Compilation: Be mindful of compilation passes. References (\ref) and bibliographies often require multiple passes (latex -> bibtex -> latex -> latex) to resolve correctly.
• Floats: If your images are floating away from your text, the [H] placement specifier from the float package is your best tool, but use it sparingly as it disrupts the natural document flow.
• Pathing: Avoid using absolute file paths in \includegraphics to ensure your project remains portable across different machines.