New technote features: ChatOps, LaTeX & BibTeX bibliographies

Start your next technote from Slack

Starting a new technote has always been relatively easy thanks to cookiecutter, but it involved a bit of coordination to set up the continuous deployment service. Thanks to SQuaRE Bot, you can now create and publish a new technote straight from LSSTC’s Slack workspace.

The Slack command looks like this:

@sqrbot project create technote series={{<series>}} title={{<title>}} description={{<description>}}

The series can be can be DMTN, SQR or SMTN. See the docs for more information.

Tip: making technotes is fun, but don’t create new technotes unless you intend to write one.

Thanks to @adam for building this feature!

p.s. If you tried this command earlier in the year during the beta, you might have run into timeout issues. We’ve retooled the backend microservice to work asynchronously and now it should be more robust.

LaTeX technotes

The DM technote platform started out with reStructuredText to make web-native documents that are convenient to share. In the two years since, DM has improved our support for LaTeX with the lsst-texmf project. Now you can also create technotes with LaTeX. Like reStructuredText technotes, robots build and publish LaTeX technotes the moment you push to GitHub. See https://dmtn-036.lsst.io for an example.

To get started with LaTeX technotes, see the docs.

SQuaRE Bot doesn’t support LaTeX project creation yet, but it’s on our TODO list.

You might notice that separate metadata files aren’t necessary to build PDF landing pages. This is thanks to our new metasrc package that pulls information from LaTeX documents and Git repositories.

Support for BibTeX bibliographies in reStructuredText technotes

lsst-texmf provides BibTeX databases that are shared across all our documents. Now reStructuredText-based technotes can use these bibliographies too.

All reStructuredText-based technotes include a command to pull the latest BibTeX files from lsst-texmf:

make refresh-bib

Then in your document, make citations like this:

:cite:`2007PASP..119.1462B`

At the end, create a bibliography like this:

.. bibliography:: local.bib lsstbib/books.bib lsstbib/lsst.bib lsstbib/lsst-dm.bib lsstbib/refs.bib lsstbib/refs_ads.bib
   :encoding: latex+latin
   :style: lsst_aa

More details are in the docs.

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