I'm a high-school aeronautics teacher and I went down a LaTeX rabbit hole — ended up building an elegant notes theme. Sharing it.
I teach Aircraft Structures at a technical high school, and I write all my course material in LaTeX. What started as "let me tweak the colors a bit" turned into a full drop-in theme over a few weekends.
It's called Skywrite. The idea: technical notes that are actually pleasant to read. A cool blue-grey "drafting table" palette, colour-coded callout boxes (definition / theorem / proof / example / intuition / warning…) each with its own hand-drawn TikZ icon, a monograph-style cover, part dividers that open like book chapters with a big Garamond chapter number, and a matching pgfplots style so the graphs don't clash.
A few things I'm oddly proud of:
- Works on pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX — it detects the engine and loads fonts accordingly, so no "wrong compiler" headaches.
- Light and dark modes, five accent colours, Italian/English labels.
- A
paper=whiteoption for when you actually have to print and want to spare the toner. - One self-indulgent detail: an automatic coffee-stain on the first section. Because of course.
One .sty file, a worked example, and a guide. Drop it next to your .tex, set one line, compile.
Repo (MIT licensed): https://github.com/braucci/skywrite
Happy to hear feedback — especially the rough edges. First time sharing something like this.
Posted Jun 25, 2026, 6:48 AM UTC