papyrus-writing

name	papyrus-writing
description	LaTeX paper writing and editing. Load when working on a .tex document — writing or revising sections, fixing compilation errors, adding figures/tables/equations, or managing a bibliography. Also the co-author skill for the Papyrus app.
triggers	latex, .tex, papyrus, paper, manuscript, bibliography, bibtex, citation, figure, equation, pdflatex, abstract, section, co-author

LaTeX paper writing

You are editing a real manuscript that someone will submit. Two rules dominate everything else:

• Preserve the author's voice. Suggest, don't rewrite. When a sentence is merely different-not-better, leave it alone.
• Read before you edit. The user may have changed the file since your last read, and in the Papyrus app they are editing it live in the other pane. Read the file, then make a minimal, surgical edit.

Show the exact LaTeX you changed. A diff of two lines is more useful than a paragraph describing the change.

Papyrus app specifics

When the user is working in the Papyrus app, the paper lives under the app's data directory:

<KiroCrew data home>/apps/papyrus/data/projects/<project>/

The KiroCrew data home is ~/.kiro/crew unless KIROCREW_HOME is set. Each project has a main .tex file (usually main.tex), typically a references.bib, and often a sections/ or figures/ subfolder.

• Which project you are in is in the chat session title: papyrus-<project>.
• Read and edit the .tex files with your normal file tools. Do NOT try to compile by shelling out to pdflatex — the app owns compilation, and it deliberately runs the compiler with shell escape DISABLED. After you edit, tell the user to press Cmd+S (Ctrl+S on Linux) and the PDF pane refreshes.
• Compilation errors are surfaced in the app as a clickable list. If the user pastes one, the line number refers to the file named in the message, which is not always the main document (an error inside \input{sections/intro} reports sections/intro.tex).

Fixing compilation errors

Work from the FIRST error, not the last: LaTeX errors cascade, and the tail of the log is usually damage from the head.

Message	Usual cause
Undefined control sequence	A typo'd macro, or a missing \usepackage
File 'x.sty' not found	Package not installed in this TeX distribution — prefer a package the document already loads over telling the user to install one
Missing $ inserted	Math symbol (_, ^, \alpha) used outside math mode
Missing \begin{document}	Something before the preamble ended, often a stray character
Citation 'key' undefined	Key absent from the .bib, or the bibliography needs another pass — add the entry rather than removing the \cite
There's no line here to end	A \\ on an otherwise-empty line
Overfull \hbox	Not an error. A line ran into the margin; fix it only if the user asks

Style guide

• Use the standard packages: amsmath, amssymb, graphicx, hyperref, natbib or biblatex, booktabs.
• Follow the target venue's template when the project has one — a conference style file in the project is authoritative over your defaults.
• Label everything you can reference: \label{sec:...}, \label{fig:...}, \label{tab:...}, \label{eq:...}, and reference with \ref/\eqref.
• Never hardcode a number you could reference (as shown in Figure 3 rots the moment a figure moves; as shown in Figure~\ref{fig:x} does not).
• Use a non-breaking space before a reference: Figure~\ref{fig:x}.
• booktabs rules only — \toprule, \midrule, \bottomrule. No vertical rules.

Patterns

Figure

\begin{figure}[t]
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{figures/example.pdf}
  \caption{What the reader should take away, not what the axes are.}
  \label{fig:example}
\end{figure}

Table

\begin{table}[t]
  \centering
  \caption{Results on the held-out split.}
  \label{tab:results}
  \begin{tabular}{lcc}
    \toprule
    Method & Precision & Recall \\
    \midrule
    Baseline & 0.81 & 0.77 \\
    Ours & \textbf{0.95} & 0.89 \\
    \bottomrule
  \end{tabular}
\end{table}

Equation

\begin{equation}
  \mathcal{L} = -\sum_{i=1}^{N} y_i \log \hat{y}_i
  \label{eq:loss}
\end{equation}

Refer to it as Equation~\eqref{eq:loss}.

Citations

• \citet{key} reads as a subject: "Smith et al. (2024) showed..."
• \citep{key} reads as an aside: "...as has been shown (Smith et al., 2024)."

Add the entry to the .bib file when you introduce a key. A \cite to a missing key compiles to a bold [?] in the PDF, which is easy to miss.

Bibliography entry

@inproceedings{smith2024method,
  title     = {A Method for Doing the Thing},
  author    = {Smith, Jane and Doe, John},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Conference},
  year      = {2024},
  pages     = {1--12},
}