ERC-STG: LaTeX Template

LaTeX class and template for the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant applications. The goal of this template is to be as close as possible to the original template provided by the ERC. However, at this time (2024) the call imposes very few strict rules for the formatting (margins, font size, font type), so you are always free to be more creative with it. For a wonderfully colorful example, see a proposal by Matthew von Hippel.

• Details and original template is provided here (calls are updated each year).
• For a rtf version of the template, you must start the submission process. The template will then be available on the left-hand side in a section named "Download Part B templates".

Caution: This is still a work in progress and it has not been submitted to ERC and deemed eligible.

Fonts

The official ERC guidelines require the Times New Roman, Arial or similar fonts. On Windows, these should be available, but on Linux we fall back to the Nimbus family of fonts. When using PDFLaTeX this class uses the mathptmx font. When using XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX, we try to load the Times New Roman font and, if it is not available, the Nimbus Roman font (or Arial and Nimbus Sans, respectively).

If these do not work for you, you can load fonts yourself using e.g.

% on PDFLaTeX
\usepackage{newtxtext}
\usepackage{newtxmath}

% on XeLaTeX / LuaLaTeX
\setmainfont{Times New Roman}

Building

The resulting PDF files are included for easy viewing, but it is recommended to build the two parts with e.g. latexmk as follows

latexmk -pdflua erc-stg-b1-template.tex
latexmk -pdflua erc-stg-b2-template.tex

Functionality

This packages provides the erc-stg class that is based on the KOMA-script scrartcl class and accepts any options meant for it. It can be used as

\documentclass[11pt,layoutgrid,draftproposal]{erc-stg}

% ... preamble ...

\begin{document}

% ... content ...

\end{document}

The class has three options meant for drafting:

• layoutgrid: overlays a grid on top of each page to check margins and other alignment issues.
• draftproposal: adds helpful drafting options, such as line numbers and a time stamp.
• nocomments: disables the ERC template documents. These are just provided as documentation and should be disabled on the start of a new proposal.

The part B1 and part B2 templates are quite different, so there are some options to control their formatting:

• partone: overwrites \maketitle to create the Part B1 title page.
• parttwo: overwrites \maketitle for the Part B2 title.
• timesnewroman: selects the Times New Roman font (or Nimbus Roman) and ensures that the serif font is the default.
• arial selects the Arial font (or Helvetica or Nimbus Sans) and ensures the sans serif font is the default.

It also provides a few useful commands that can be used in the proposal. These should be set in both the Part B1 and Part B2 files to ensure that the proposal metadata is available.

• \ercauthor: sets the full author name (first and last name).
• \ercauthorlastname: sets the author's last name (used in the header).
• \ercinstitution: sets the hosting institution.
• \ercduration: sets the duration of the project (in months).
• \erctitle: sets the proposal title.
• \ercacronym: sets the proposal acronym (must match the title).
• \ercsummary: defines the summary that appears on the title page of Part B1.
• \erccrossummary: defines the cross-disciplinary proposal justification that appears on the title page of Part B1. If no such justification is needed, use the \ercnocrosssummary command to remove the box and text for this part.

The following optional helper environments are also defined:

• erccomment: exclusively used for the ERC documentation comments in the template.
• erccvitem: a simple wrapper around tabular for adding nicely aligned CV items.
• erctable: a simple wrapper around tabular with consistent formatting.
• erclongtable: a simple wrapper around longtable with consistent formatting.