This is a project I worked on whilst being in my third year at the University of Coburg. In their third year students are supposed to spent some time in industry projects. Every student has to write a scientific piece of work regarding those industry projects in order to prepare for their theses. The University of applied sciences Coburg has a unique guideline for layout and style of bachelor or master theses that also applies to most other scientific documents. When I was writing my piece of work I found out that the implementation of the guidelines took up valuable time that could have otherwise been invested in actual work. Since I am not the opinion that setting up Microsoft Word is a task with which engineering students demonstrate intellectual ability, I contacted the person in charge of the guidelines for scientific documents and explained to him the need of having a plain pre-built LaTeX-Skeleton for all students. He immediatly agreed and so I found myself in charge of setting up this skeleton.
Most students have little experience with writing scientific documents and have no idea how to go about it. LaTeX is the de-facto standard word processor for scientific and high-quality content. I know from experience that setting up a LaTeX document without any help can be quite discouraging. Because of that many waste their time with other typesetting systems. The LaTeX-Layout is also supposed to help introduce young students to LaTeX.
Failures
Since I have gotten little feedback for the LaTeX-Layout I do not know where my biggest mistakes were. In retrospect I think that I have done a bad job structuring and commenting the code itself. Someone with much less experience might not be able to succesfully alter the layout. One could imagine a student that successfully starts to write his scientific document until he has to make changes to the skeleton itself, where he stalls because he is unable to change my code and have the document compile.