A large part of an academic’s life is writing grant proposals that are submitted to funding agencies. One of the UK’s funding agencies that supports research in security, safety, and correctness of systems is EPSRC. EPSRC officially requires proposal to follow a certain layout, that is summarized on the EPSRC website as follows:

All attachments must be completed in single-spaced typescript in Arial 11 or other sans serif typeface of equivalent size, with margins of at least 2cm. Arial narrow and Calibri are not allowable font types.

Text in embedded diagrams or pictures, numerical formulae or references can be smaller, as long as it is legible. Text in tables and figure labels not within embedded diagrams or pictures should be at least 11 point.

We recommend that all attachments are uploaded into Je-S as Adobe Acrobat files (PDF) as uploading word documents can result in layout changes to the document. Also, as Je-S does not support all Microsoft Office Word font types, unsupported fonts will be replaced, possibly resulting in layout changes to the document.

On the one hand, this is a rather loosely specified layout. On the other hand, it is not that straight forward to implement using LaTeX. For example, font sizes in LaTeX are specified slightly differently: the well-known 11pt option sets the default font size to 10.95 TeX points (pt), which is 10.909 = 10.95 * 72/72.27 Postscript Points (bp). Hence, the font size needs to be scaled by a factor of 11/10.909.

The new LaTeX class epsrc aims for making proposal writing a little easier. To ensure the consistency of common configurations across the various documents that EPSRC requires, the class file uses a file epsrc.config that, if available, is shared across all documents. A minimal example is:

\author{Poor Researcher}
\projectitle[PGMM]{Please Give Me Money}

Otherwise, the class file is loaded as usual:

\documentclass{epsrc}

For more details, please see the example and documentation at https://git.logicalhacking.com/adbrucker/epsrc.