It's not "beautiful" (in fact, the author seems to have terrible layout/style sense) and that github page is just...terrible. I'm not sure why the author chose to embed 10 pages of PNGs on it.
But
I think there's definitely a need for well-curated collections of "common things people want or need to do documents"...like the "draft" watermarking, confidential flag, QR codes, org charts/family trees, and so on - especially if they are well-commented.
I would love to see such a collection for doing various common page layouts, and also for leveraging many of the features of PDFs.
And no, the various sites that host lots of example LaTeX documents don't feel like they are really a substitute. I've found them poorly curated and as a LaTeX novice, it's difficult to figure out how to extract the one thing the author of the document is doing that you want to pull and replicate. So often, I've tried to do so and ended up with incomprehensible 'compile' errors.
Even after repeated attempts to learn LaTeX and do useful things with it, I still find it almost impenetrable. Debugging is nearly impossible because the "compiler" gives completely shit error messages, and looking at LaTeX code as a beginner, I just see meaningless ASCII vomit. LaTeX seems to use a ton of "this one particular punctuation mark or letter tacked on to this command or function means LaTeX will actually interpret that as..." bullshit that makes the code impossible to read or understand.
I understand why that sort of shorthand was done given LaTeX was written in the Every Byte Is Sacred Era - but some evolution of LaTeX to be more parseable to the human eye/brain in the last three decades would have been nice.
The third edition is just out of the presses. I have the 2nd one, and one of the appendixes is an explanation of LaTeX and TeX infamously cryptic error messages, and it is really useful.
As for using PDF features, try PDFLaTeX or even better, XeLaTeX or luatex. The latter use utf-8 and advanced PDF kerning techniques, among other useful stuff.
But
I think there's definitely a need for well-curated collections of "common things people want or need to do documents"...like the "draft" watermarking, confidential flag, QR codes, org charts/family trees, and so on - especially if they are well-commented.
I would love to see such a collection for doing various common page layouts, and also for leveraging many of the features of PDFs.
And no, the various sites that host lots of example LaTeX documents don't feel like they are really a substitute. I've found them poorly curated and as a LaTeX novice, it's difficult to figure out how to extract the one thing the author of the document is doing that you want to pull and replicate. So often, I've tried to do so and ended up with incomprehensible 'compile' errors.
Even after repeated attempts to learn LaTeX and do useful things with it, I still find it almost impenetrable. Debugging is nearly impossible because the "compiler" gives completely shit error messages, and looking at LaTeX code as a beginner, I just see meaningless ASCII vomit. LaTeX seems to use a ton of "this one particular punctuation mark or letter tacked on to this command or function means LaTeX will actually interpret that as..." bullshit that makes the code impossible to read or understand.
I understand why that sort of shorthand was done given LaTeX was written in the Every Byte Is Sacred Era - but some evolution of LaTeX to be more parseable to the human eye/brain in the last three decades would have been nice.