Few things are as immediately recognizable as an academic document typeset in LaTeX: the Computer Modern font family, the justified text with first-line paragraph indentation, the clean hierarchy of section headings. These produce a look that Microsoft Word and its clones rarely replicate.
iA Writer is a distraction-free Markdown editor for those who prefer to work in plain text. iA Writer’s template system makes it possible to bring the typographic conventions of LaTeX into a Markdown workflow without touching a .tex file, or using an additional tool such as pandoc.
This template aims to do exactly that. It uses the Computer Modern Unicode (CMU) font family — the same fonts LaTeX loads by default — and applies the typographic rules of the standard article class: justified body text with first-line paragraph indentation, a clean three-level heading hierarchy, monospace code blocks in CMU Typewriter, and table styling in the spirit of the booktabs package. The result is a PDF that pays homage to those produced by LaTeX itself.
What the Template Includes
The download contains four files:
- LaTeX-Article.iatemplate — the iA Writer template bundle, ready to install
- LaTeX-Article-Example.md — a sample document demonstrating every supported feature, including the title block, abstract, headings, lists, code blocks, tables, blockquotes, and footnotes
- LaTeX-Article-Example.pdf — a rendered PDF of the example document, so you can see the output before installing
- README.md — an overview document with installation and user instructions.
Who It Is For
The template is well suited to anyone who writes documents intended to look like conventional scholarly work — working papers, technical reports, draft manuscripts, course materials, or internal research memos. It is not a replacement for LaTeX in contexts that require precise equation typesetting or journal-specific formatting, but for prose-heavy documents where the goal is clean, credible presentation, it produces excellent results with ease.
How It Works
Installation takes a single double-click. Once installed, the template appears in iA Writer’s template chooser in the Preview panel. Selecting it applies the styling immediately; exporting to PDF preserves it.
Title Block
The title block convention is straightforward. Wrapping the opening lines of a document in a <div class="title-block"> element — with the paper title as a first-level Markdown heading followed by plain-text author and date lines — produces a centered, ruled title block in the structure of LaTeX’s \maketitle output. The rest of the document is written in standard Markdown.
All styling is contained in a single well-commented HTML file inside the template bundle, making it straightforward to adjust font size, line spacing, margins, or link color to suit a particular use case.
Download
The template is free to use and modify.
Download LaTeX Article for iA Writer (ZIP archive, includes template, example document, and example PDF)
The README included in the archive covers installation, the title block convention, section numbering, footnote syntax, and instructions for offline font use for those who work without a consistent internet connection.