Thesis Template

A latex thesis class template.

A LaTeX thesis template that was tweaked over a few years and condensed to a class file. A BibTeX bibliography class file is also provided.

Table of Contents

Instructions, font support, nomenclature support, acronym form, expanded form, expanded and acronym form, using tex-based glossary construction, multi-page floats, sub-captions, tables spanning multiple pages, landscape tables, table row colours, bibliography.

On creating a new LaTeX document, start the document with \documentclass { thesis } . Options for the document are specified below. You should also define the macros \title{} , \author{} , \department{} and \university{} in the header of your document. The thesis class also provides an optional \dedication{} macro.

When writing the main body of your document, the macro \startpreamble can be called to generate the title page and switch page numbering to Roman numerals. You can then create sections with \section*{} for preamble content such as acknowledgements, abstracts and table of contents.

When declaring an end to the preamble, call the macro \stoppreamble to change page numbering back to Arabic numerals.

The thesis class imports the natbib package thus giving the option of paragraph citations ( \citep{} ) and text citations ( \citet{} ).

The class also provides shortcuts for declaring real numbers with \R{exponent_here} , expected values with \E{value} , Normal distributions with \N{mean}{variance} and probabilities with \p{value} or \p[value]{posterior} .

Optional document parameters

The \documentclass [options] { thesis } supports a number of options including the following:

  • 11pt for 11pt size text.
  • a4paper for A4 paper mode.
  • authoryear to use author-year citations rather than the numbering standard.
  • draftfigs to use placeholders for figures for faster compilation (with the draft argument for graphicx ).
  • lineno to print line numbers throughout the document.
  • smallcaptions to use \small font size for captions declared with \caption{} .
  • twoside for double sided printing (this will adjust the margins accordingly).
  • texglossaries for using TeX-based construction of glossaries instead of makeindex .
  • unsrt to order bibliography by appearance in text.

The following fonts are supported and can be enabled using the corresponding documentclass option:

  • didot to use the GFS Didot serif font.
  • garamond to use the URW Garamond serif font (note that this is not installed by default and is now considered a non-free font).
  • helvetica to use the Helvetica sans serif font.
  • latinmodern to use the Latin Modern Sans sans serif font.
  • libertine to use the Linux Libertine serif font.
  • palatino to use the Palatino serif font.
  • sourcesanspro to use the Source Sans Pro sans serif font.
  • times to use the Times serif font.

Nomenclature is supported with the nomencl package ( see CTAN ). New nomenclature can be defined as follows:

To compile the list of nomenclature, open up a terminal/command prompt session and run:

If the thesis file is something other than MyThesis , then MyThesis should be replaced in the above with the name of the master thesis file.

Nomenclature will be displayed wherever the macro \printnomenclature is called. The width of the first column can be defined by including an optional width (e.g. \printnomenclature[2cm] ). The nomenclature section contains the following preamble:

A list of the variables and notation used in this thesis is defined below. The definitions and conventions set here will be observed throughout unless otherwise stated.

Should acronyms be detected (by detecting the presence of filename.acr ), then the preamble will be appended with:

For a list of acronyms, please consult page~\pageref{gl:acronym}

Acronym support

Acronyms are supported with the glossaries package ( see CTAN ). New acronyms can be defined as follows:

Within the document, the commands \gls{label} , \Gls{label} , \glspl{label} and \Glspl{label} can be used in place of abbreviated forms. These commands correspond with the lowercase singular, sentence case singular, lowercase plural and sentence case plural forms, respectively. LaTeX will automatically expand the acronym on the first instance and use the abbreviated form thereafter.

Using the macro \printgloss will create a new chapter and write appendix items after they have been compiled. This macro will call either the \printglossaries or \printnoidxglossaries macro, depending on whether the texglossaries document option has been declared ( see Using TeX-based glossary construction ).

To compile the list of acronyms, open up a terminal/command prompt session and run:

It may be desirable to override the default behaviour in which case, the following commands can be used.

  • \acrshort{label} : lowercase, singular acronym form.
  • \Acrshort{label} : sentence case, singular acronym form.
  • \acrshortpl{label} : lowercase, plural acronym form.
  • \Acrshortpl{label} : sentence case, plural acronym form.
  • \acrlong{label} : lowercase, singular expanded form.
  • \Acrlong{label} : sentence case, singular expanded form.
  • \acrlongpl{label} : lowercase, plural expanded form.
  • \Acrlongpl{label} : sentence case, plural expanded form.
  • \acrfull{label} : lowercase, singular expanded form proceeded by acronym in parentheses.
  • \Acrfull{label} : sentence case, singular expanded form proceeded by acronym in parentheses.
  • \acrfullpl{label} : lowercase, plural expanded form proceeded by acronym in parentheses.
  • \Acrfullpl{label} : sentence case, plural expanded form proceeded by acronym in parentheses.

Words are made plural by simply appending “s” to the end of an acronym or its expanded form. Some words do not conform to this generalisation and may require the long plural form to be redefined using:

Note: \newacronym definitions need to be defined prior to usage. I recommend placing such definitions within a separate file (e.g. Acronyms.tex ) and using \input { Acronyms } just before opening the document environment.

The above acronym compilation instructions required the use of terminal/command prompt and calling the makeglossaries command. On some systems, this requirement is undesirable or impossible to execute. By declaring texglossaries within the document declaration options, the template will switch to using the TeX-based glossary compiler.

To create a new chapter and write appendix items after they have been compiled, simply call \printgloss as before.

Note: Calling makeglossaries is generally more efficient to use and provides options for languages other than English. I recommend that you use makeglossaries wherever possible.

Floats such as figures and algorithms can span multiple pages with the included caption package (for tables, I recommend using the longtable environment described below). When wanting to declare the continuation of an algorithm, simply call \ContinuedFloat after opening the environment. This should then be followed by the caption macro (which should automatically use the same counter as the previous float).

Sub-captions are supported via the subcaption package ( see CTAN ). To use sub-captions in a figure, declare a figure environment as normal and then use the subfigure environment to create subb figures:

The thesis class creates a new float for algorithms that can be called with:

A list of algorithms can generated using the \listofalgorithms macro. This can be used in the same way as \listoffigures and \listoftables .

The thesis class also uses the listings package which provides support for writing source code in any of the supported programming languages or a user-defined language ( see CTAN ).

Several packages have been added improving or enhancing the formatting of tables. These are described in the following subsections.

Tables spanning multiple pages are supported with the longtable package ( see CTAN ). Simply declare the environment and add any necessary table headers and footers:

Landscape-oriented tables are supported using the rotating package ( see CTAN ). To rotate a table, encapsulate your caption, label and tabular environment within a sidewaystable environment:

Rows of a table can be given a background colour using the \rowcolour[color]{intensity} command, provided by the color and colortbl packages (see CTAN for color and colortbl packages). Simply append the command at the end of a table row for the row’s background to change. In the following example, the background of the row will be grey at 90% intensity:

The thesis class provides support for multiple appendix items. Appendices will create new chapters that are labelled alphabetically and each appendix item will appear in the table of contents. To declare the start of the appendix section, use the macro \appendix . New chapters from this point will form different appendix items.

This class uses the natbib bibliography package and, specifically, the plainnaturl.bst bibliography stylesheet. The custom stylesheet displays initials and surname for all authors and removes URL and DOI information from bibliography entries. URL fields are preserved for miscellaneous/Internet bibliographic entries.

Note that the package prefers bibliographic information to be added as a separate bib file rather than appended to the bottom of a document.

The class file also has support for creating index items via the makeidx package ( see CTAN ). To create append the index to the end of the document and include it within the Table of Contents, use:

because LaTeX matters

Writing a thesis in latex.

Writing a thesis is a time-intensive endeavor. Fortunately, using LaTeX, you can focus on the content rather than the formatting of your thesis. The following article summarizes the most important aspects of writing a thesis in LaTeX, providing you with a document skeleton (at the end) and lots of additional tips and tricks.

Document class

The first choice in most cases will be the report document class:

See here for a complete list of options. Personally, I use draft a lot. It replaces figures with a box of the size of the figure. It saves you time generating the document. Furthermore, it will highlight justification and hyphenation errors ( Overfull \hbox ).

Check with your college or university. They may have an official or unofficial template/class-file to be used for writing a thesis.

Again, follow the instructions of your institution if there are any. Otherwise, LaTeX provides a few basic command for the creation of a title page.

maketitle

Use \today as \date argument to automatically generate the current date. Leave it empty in case you don’t want the date to be printed. As shown in the example, the author command can be extended to print several lines.

For a more sophisticated title page, the titlespages package has a nice collection of pre-formatted front pages. For different affiliations use the authblk package, see here for some examples.

Contents (toc/lof/lot)

Nothing special here.

The tocloft package offers great flexibility in formatting contents. See here for a selection of possibilities.

Often, the page numbers are changed to roman for this introductory part of the document and only later, for the actual content, arabic page numbering is used. This can be done by placing the following commands before and after the contents commands respectively.

LaTeX provides the abstract environment which will print “Abstract” centered as a title.

abstract

The actual content

The most important and extensive part is the content. I strongly suggest to split up every chapter into an individual file and load them in the main tex-file.

In thesis.tex:

In chapter1.tex:

This way, you can typeset single chapters or parts of the whole thesis only, by commenting out what you want to exclude. Remember, the document can only be generated from the main file (thesis.tex), since the individual chapters are missing a proper LaTeX document structure.

See here for a discussion on whether to use \input or \include .

Bibliography

The most convenient way is to use a bib-tex file that contains all your references. You can download bibtex items for articles, books, etc. from Google scholar or often directly from the journal websites.

Two packages are commonly used to personalize bibliographies, the newer biblatex and the natbib package, which has been around for many years. These packages offer great flexibility in customizing the look of a bibliography, depending on the preference in the field or the author.

Other commonly used packages

  • graphicx : Indispensable when working with figures/graphs.
  • subfig : Controlling arrangement of several figures (e.g. 2×2 matrix)
  • minitoc : Adds mini table of contents to every chapter
  • nomencl : Generate and format a nomenclature
  • listings : Source code printer for LaTeX
  • babel : Multilingual package for standard document classes
  • fancyhdr : Controlling header and footer
  • hyperref : Hypertext links for LaTeX
  • And many more

Minimal example code

I’m aware that this short post on writing a thesis only covers the very basics of a vast topic. However, it will help you getting started and focussing on the content of your thesis rather than the formatting of the document.

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16 comments.

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8. June 2012 at 7:09

I would rather recommend a documentclass like memoir or scrreprt (from KOMA-Script), since they are much more flexible than report.

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8. June 2012 at 8:12

I agree, my experience with them is limited though. Thanks for the addendum. Here is the documentation: memoir , scrreprt (KOMA script)

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8. June 2012 at 8:02

Nice post Tom. I’m actually writing a two-part (or three) on Writing the PhD thesis: the tools . Feel free to comment, I hope to update it as I write my thesis, so any suggestions are welcome.

8. June 2012 at 8:05

Thanks for the link. I just saw your post and thought I should really check out git sometimes :-). Best, Tom.

8. June 2012 at 8:10

Yes, git is awesome. It can be a bit overwhelming with all the options and commands, but if you’re just working alone, and probably on several machines, then you can do everything effortlessly with few commands.

11. June 2012 at 2:15

That’s what has kept me so far. But I’ll definitely give it a try. Thanks!

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8. June 2012 at 8:08

What a great overview. Thank you, this will come handy… when I finally get myself to start writing that thesis 🙂

8. June 2012 at 14:12

Thanks and good luck with your thesis! Tom.

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9. June 2012 at 4:08

Hi, I can recommend two important packages: lineno.sty to insert linenumbers (really helpful in the debugging phase) and todonotes (allows you to insert todo-notes for things you still have to do.)

11. June 2012 at 0:48

Thanks Uwe! I wrote an article on both, lineno and todonotes . Here is the documentation: lineno and todonotes for more details.

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12. June 2012 at 15:51

Thanks for the post, i’m currently writing my master thesis 🙂

A small note: it seems that subfig is deprecated for the subcaption package: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Captions#Subfloats

12. June 2012 at 16:05

Hey, thanks for the tip. Too bad they don’t say anything in the documentation apart from the fact that the packages are not compatible.

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1. August 2012 at 21:11

good thesis template can be also found here (free): http://enjobs.org/index.php/downloads2

including living headers, empty pages, two-sided with front and main matter as well as a complete structure

2. August 2012 at 11:03

Thanks for the link to the thesis template!

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15. November 2012 at 22:21

Hi Tom, I’m writing a report on spanish in LaTex, using emacs, auctex, aspell (~170pags. ~70 files included by now) and this blog is my savior every time because I’m quite new with all these.

The question: Is there anyway (other than \- in every occurrence) to define the correct hyphenation for accented words (non english characters like é)? I have three o four accented words, about the subject of my report, that occur near 100 times each, across several files, and the \hyphenation{} command can’t handle these.

20. November 2012 at 3:47

I was wondering what packages you load in your preamble. For a better hyphenation (and easier typing), you should use these packages:

See here for more details.

If this doesn’t help, please provide a minimal working example to illustrate the problem.

Thanks, Tom.

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Writing a thesis in latex.

This article is a guide to constructing a decent parent file for a thesis or dissertation compiled in Latex. The specific details implemented here, and included in the example files, are those set out by the guidelines for submission to the University of Nottingham, but can be easily amended to suit any sensible requirements.

Considerable attention has been paid to presenting the final document as a PDF file, which keeps the file size manageable (compared to postscript) and allows groovy add-ons such as hyperlinks and back-referencing. However, several hacks are required to attain good functionality from your PDF file and these can give the latex code a mysterious (and messy) appearance in places. While I highly recommend the inclusion of the PDF-related commands, they are not strictly necessary and can be ignored especially if you are new to Latex.

Note for Windows users

The code outlined below was designed and implemented on the unix system at Nottingham. For those of you unfortunate enough to be running a Windows box, a number of problems may arise when using the below code:

First off, not all the packages used will be present and will need to be installed. Probably the easiest way to do this is to google the package name with the extension .sty and save this file in the C:\VTEX\l2e\\ directory of your machine. Note that for the natbib package, you will also need to download the relevant .bst file, which in this case is unsrtnat.bst .

Also, many of the packages that are installed locally may need updating. For instance, the computers I have tested on both have old versions of the geometry and caption packages, which cause Latex to return errors. To resolve these problems, either download the latest versions, or remove the includefoot option from the geometry package and set the bottom margin to 1.4in.

Also, the code for compiling to PDF does not work so well in Windows, and so it is recommended that Windows users use the template without PDF code.

Requirements

The guidelines for theses to be submitted to the University of Nottingham specify that:

  • the document should be presented on single-sided a4 paper and typeset in a double-spaced size 10-12 font;
  • the left-hand margin should be at least 1.5 inches (4cm) to allow for binding;
  • the other three margins should be at least 1 inch (2.5cm).

Other settings such as the way chapter headings are formatted, and whether headers are included, are not specified and are up to the user. In this case, we’ll install headers and tinker with the chapter formatting.

Template files

Here are the template files which this page explains:

  • thesis_without_pdfcode.tex
  • thesis_with_pdfcode.tex

The appearance of both these files on the printed page will be identical; however after compilation into PDF (see the section below) and opening in Adobe Acrobat (or a similar PDF reader), the advantages that come with the PDF format will be apparent.

  • thesis_without_pdfcode.pdf
  • thesis_with_pdfcode.pdf

The rest of this page is devoted to explaining the code in these files.

Document structure

The document begins in a standard and entirely self-explanatory manner.

Preamble: essential packages

Next, the essential packages are loaded:

where the geometry package has been loaded to allow the margins to be set in a neat and consistent way. The non-obvious option includefoot ensures that the footer (which only contains the pagenumber) is included in the page and is thus 1 inch above the bottom of the page. Note that this option is only available in recent versions of the package: if you’re using an old version and can’t/won’t upgrade, then remove the offending option and extend the bottom margin to 1.4in. headheight=13.6pt is included due to to ensure compatibility with the fancyhdr package (and is not required if you don’t use the fancyhdr package). Also quite essential is the natbib package:

where the various options ensure that references appear in the document as:

…boiled dog can do maths claims experimenter [10,12,15-18].

Alternative referencing styles are easily implemented, see the natbib help file for more details. In fact, to use the natbib package, you’ll have to read at least a few lines of the help file so you understand the difference between \citet and \citep , and I insist you do that now.

Preamble: custom captions (optional)

We now set the figure captions to be elegant and dignified:

Note that early versions of this package don’t support the margin= and tableposition= options; in this case, these trimmings will have to be ignored.

Preamble: custom fonts (optional)

You can also choose an alternative font for both the text and the mathematical characters. This can be achieved by:

Aside from mathpazo , there are several other fonts available, such as chancery , palatino and times (all loaded in the same way).

Preamble: fancy headers (optional)

Feeling a little devil-may-care? If so, you’ll probably want to install some elegant headers along each page. This is easily achieved through the fancyhdr package:

The final complicated-looking three lines simply ensure that the headings for appendices are formatted correctly. (Without these lines, what should read “Appendix A” is set as “Chapter A”.)

Preamble: customised chapter/section headings (optional)

We now make use of several customisation options that are bundled with the sectsty package.

These alter the appearance of the first page of each chapter to have a centred title, with the word “chapter” set in small capitals immediately above. Feel free to employ your own individual and highly refined tastes here in choosing your own chapter/section settings.

Preamble: pdf options (optional)

If you want to publish your thesis on the internet, or even just to email it to someone, then you’ll want to store it in the ubiquitous PDF format. Doing so offers some neat facilities, such as hyperlinking, which are implemented by the hyperref package:

There are various other options you can pass to your favourite PDF reader via the \hypersetup command, such as pdftitle , pdfauthor and pdfsubject ; however, they’re not really essential. Note that the hyperlink colours have all been set to black for consistent printing. Should you want to distribute your thesis over the web, then it would be advisable to set these colours to red or something similarly vibrant and exciting.

Things get a little messy now as a hack is required to ensure the hyperlinks actually jump to the right place.

No need to worry about this code, let’s just move straight on.

Preamble: page layout

We now set various parameters to alter the general page layout:

The first two of these commands alter the paragraph formatting so that new paragraphs are not indented but separated from the previous one by a small amount of whitespace; the third sets the line spacing. The sharp-eyed among you will notice the discrepancy between our chosen line-spacing and that dictated by the university guidelines. However, no matter how poor your eyesight is, you’ll quickly appreciate that true double line-spacing (set with \renewcommand(\baselinestretch}{2} ) looks rubbish. In addition, Nottingham University are perfectly happy to accept theses set with the above line-spacing, which is more pleasing to the eye.

Some final settings:

Set which chapters to include when Latex is next run. The advantage of this method is that all your cross-references are remembered and Latex does not spit out loads of warnings.

Main matter

We now begin the document in earnest and define a suitable title:

followed by a dedication:

We now construct an abstract:

some acknowledgements:

and a contents page:

Now, we alter the pagenumbering to arabic and point to the relevant chapter files:

All your chapter files should be included here; to save time when editing, use the \includeonly command to specify which chapters to compile.

Finally, we make sure there is a link to the references section in the table of contents and reference the correct bibiography file (which in this case is called bibliography.bib ).

And there we have it: a complete thesis parent file that not only looks good on the printed page, but is fully functional and hyperlinked in PDF format.

Compiling to PDF

Whether you’ve included all the red PDF commands or not, you can convert your TEX file to PDF by running (in unix):

The additional argument to ps2pdf is required as the default paper size is US Letter. Note that you will probably need to bibtex your thesis file before running latex for the final time.

For Windows, first open a command window by going Start->Run and entering cmd . Provided MiKTeX and GhostScript are correctly installed then the necessary commands are:

The syntax for ps2pdf is slightly different in Windows compared to Unix - and note that the output pdf filename MUST be specified, else the ps file is overwritten and corrupted.

Something wrong? Suggest an improvement or add a comment (see article history ) Tagged with: latex Filed in: guides

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Overleaf for LaTeX Theses & Dissertations: Home

  • Using Templates on Overleaf
  • Reference Managers and Overleaf
  • Adding Tables, Images, and Graphs

Tips and tools for writing your LaTeX thesis or dissertation in Overleaf, including templates, managing references , and getting started guides.

Managing References

BibTeX is a file format used for lists of references for LaTeX documents. Many citation management tools support the ability to export and import lists of references in .bib format. Some reference management tools can generate BibTeX files of your library or folders for use in your LaTeX documents.

LaTeX on Wikibooks has a Bibliography Management page.

Find list of BibTeX styles available on Overleaf here

View a video tutorial on how to include a bibliography using BibTeX  here

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How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX

Writing a thesis or dissertation in LaTeX can be challenging, but the end result is well worth it - nothing looks as good as a LaTeX-produced pdf, and for large documents it's a lot easier than fighting with formatting and cross-referencing in MS Word. Review this video from Overleaf to help you get started writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard thesis template from the Overleaf Gallery .

You can upload your own thesis template to the Overleaf Gallery if your university provides a set of LaTeX template files or you may find your university's thesis template already in the Overleaf Gallery.

This video assumes you've used LaTeX before and are familiar with the standard commands (see our other tutorial videos  if not), and focuses on how to work with a large project split over multiple files.

Add Institutional Library contact info here.

Contact Overleaf   or email [email protected]

5-part Guide on How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX

5-part LaTeX Thesis Writing Guide

Part 1: Basic Structure corresponding  video

Part 2: Page Layout corresponding  video

Part 3: Figures, Subfigures and Tables   corresponding video

Part 4: Bibliographies with Biblatex corresponding video

Part 5: Customizing Your Title Page and Abstract corresponding video

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  • Basic remarks
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Page layout

  • Bibliography
  • Footnote citing

Tips on Writing a Thesis in LaTeX

Page layout defines dimensions and location of the content elements (textual, graphical, or technical) on a page. In terms of LaTeX page layout , "body" text block, margins, headers, and footers can be attributed to such content elements. The basic LaTeX command \documentclass activates default layout, specific for each document class (e.g. article or book ). The oneside and twoside options of \documentclass adjust page layout for the one- and two-sided printing, respectively. Together with options a4paper and 11pt (defining the dimensions of a paper and the value of \normalsize font, respectively) several adjacent pages of the output PDF file look like this:

As you see, changing the page layout from oneside to twoside leads to asymmetric horizontal margins and corresponding shift of the text block while its width is kept fixed which can be seen in the non-changed location of the last line of each paragraph .

The default margins produced by LaTeX appeared to me too wide. In my thesis the text often discusses the data shown in figures, and reading the document assumes switching reader’s attention from text to figures and back. An additional switching between pages will slow down this process, and therefore it is straightforward to increase the amount of information (text) displayed on a page by reducing the page margins and font size. (Of course there are always aesthetic and technical limits in such size reduction.) Additionally, I did not place informational content into the page margins (e.g. margin notes ), and therefore their size could be safely reduced. It worth noting that reduction of the margin sizes also restricts the possibility of a reader to make margin notes on a hardcopy of the document.

Changing default page layout with typearea package

A recommended way (see section 1.2 in "An essential guide to LaTeX2ε usage" ) to change a page layout in LaTeX is to employ typearea package, which is part of KOMA-script bundle . One of the approaches used by typearea to construct a page layout is to divide the page into equal amount of rows and columns, and then extract part of the cells from the resulting cell set (see details in section 2.2 in KOMA-script documentation ). The typearea option DIV defines the amount of rows and columns, and a larger value results in a wider text block and narrower page margins.

In my thesis I have prepared all the figures with maximal width of 160 mm, and did not perform any scaling while including them into the LaTeX document, which was done to have similar size of the font in figures and in the text, as well as consistency in the final size of figure elements (such as thickness of lines and dimensions of markers). The value of DIV=14 (see corresponding table in section 2.6 of KOMA-script manual) resulted in dimensions of the text block suitable for 160 mm-wide figures: with such choice of DIV the text block was wider than any figure. The corresponding one- and two-sided page layouts looked as follows:

The option BCOR=2mm (responsible for binding correction , section 2.2 in KOMA-script manual) can be seen as an additional way for fine adjustments, and I used it to slightly reduce the width of the text block and to place it more symmetric on a page in the case of one-sided layout. The options headinclude=true, footinclude=false make an additional adjustment of the text block vertical size (see p. 37 in section 2.6 of KOMA-script manual). Just note that chosen the option DIV=14 together with 11pt resulted in the text lines wider than the value assumed to be optimal by typearea , and the following warning appeared in the LaTeX compilation logs:

Hence, the font size should be increased or DIV value decreased to reduce the amount of characters per text line and to improve text readability (see section 2.1 of KOMA-script documentation ). I did not decrease DIV because, as mentioned, the document figures were originally prepared in "up to 160 mm wide" format and were not scaled at all while including them into the document. Based on this experience, I would suggest to use smaller maximal width of figures (say, 140 mm or less) in case of typesetting for A4 paper in order to have more flexibility for adjusting the width of the text block.

Re-locating the text block

The next figure shows one more time the two-sided page layout produced after activating typearea with the options described before:

In this figure the bold lines indicate the page edges along which printed sheets assumed to be bound (glued) in a hardcopy. As you see, the narrowest margins are near those edges, and therefore part of the text will be located close to the binding edge/ spine , or, in other words, gutter will be narrow; this may introduce difficulties while reading the printed document. (It worth to note that narrowest margins near the binding edge is a standard attribute of classical approaches of constructing a page layout , one of which is actually used by typearea activated with DIV option.) To resolve this issue I moved the text block away from the binding edge adding the following lines to the last two commands:

The command block between \makeatletter and \makeatother is executed only in the case of twoside option of \documentclass due to the conditional statement \if @twoside … \fi (to avoid text block shift for one-sided document), and it introduces horizontal offset of 12 mm ( \setlength { \textblockoffset }{ 12mm } ) for odd/even ( \addtolength { \hoffset }{ \textblockoffset } ) and even only ( \addtolength { \evensidemargin }{ -2.0 \textblockoffset } ) pages. The 12 mm offset value is an arbitrary choice, and I just assumed it to be optimal for the selected options of \documentclass and \usepackage { typearea } .

The last command set enables easy switching between one- and two-sided versions of the document (with corresponding offset of the text block) by changing only oneside (or twoside ) option of the \documentclass command. In both versions the width of the text block stays exactly the same and thefore there is no need to re-check the typesetting result which is usually the case because despite good default typesetting quality produced by LaTeX, long documents often require additional manual tuning such as removal of widow/orphan lines or re-location of figures after switching layouts. Using the described approach, there is still possible a situation when the text lines can appear in the compiled document differently for oneside and twoside options, namely in case of using page numbers in the text (e.g., "...for the detailed explanation see page 123..."). This can occur because of additional empty pages at the beginning of a chapter in two-sided layout. But it can be avoided referring to the particular section of a document (e.g., "...for the detailed explanation see Section 1.1...") the rather than to the page numbers directly.

While typesetting thesis, the last command set formed the basis for producing two document versions, for screen ( oneside ) and for printing ( twoside ); links to both document versions are available on the downloads page.

After print and binding the thesis appeared in the following form (click for enlarged version):

latex thesis a4

Overleaf for LaTeX Theses & Dissertations: Using Templates on Overleaf

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LaTeX templates for journals, theses, dissertations, CVs, resumes, papers, presentations, assignments, letters, project reports, and more.

Start your projects with quality LaTeX templates for journals, theses, dissertations, CVs, resumes, papers, presentations, posters, assignments, letters, project reports, and more.

Getting started

Start with Overleaf templates

Overleaf templates make it easy to get started with all types of projects - from papers and presentations to newsletters, CVs, and much more! It's also a great way to learn LaTeX and produce professional looking projects quickly.

Begin Your Work Using the Official 'University' Thesis Template on Overleaf

(If your University has an official thesis template published on Overleaf, you can customize this box accordingly with a link to the template)

Write your thesis using the official ' Name of University goes here ' thesis template

Find your University's template on Overleaf here ( insert link to official LaTeX thesis template on Overleaf Gallery or custom Overleaf institutional portal template page ).

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Visit our thesis template gallery

latex thesis a4

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Upload or create templates for assignments, presentations, theses, posters, and student/faculty journals for your institution. Just create it as a project on Overleaf and use the publish menu.

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latex thesis a4

Graduate Education

Office of graduate and postdoctoral education, thesis templates.

The following thesis format templates should help you get started with formatting your thesis or dissertation. Georgia Tech provides free Overleaf Professional accounts for all students, faculty, and staff who would like to use the collaborative, online LaTeX editor for their projects.

  • LaTeX Template (.zip) - updated May 2020
  • Featured LaTeX templates on Overleaf
  • Word Thesis Template (.docx) - updated August 2016
  • Georgia Tech Engineering Reference Management System (GTERMS)

LaTeX Resources

  • LaTeX Project
  • Set the Quick Build command configuration to: “PdfLaTeX + Bib(la)tex) + PdfLaTeX (x2) + View Pdf”.
  • Use the Quick Build command to compile and view your .pdf file.
  • If you decide to use a “build” subdirectory for output files, you must point BibTeX to the proper subdirectory.

LaTeX is a powerful text processing and formatting tool that produces clean, consistent results. This high-quality typesetting system is a free service provided by Georgia Tech. It is available on many platforms and can be used with the editor of your choice. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.

Although Graduate Education does not offer direct technical support, Tech does provide help via campus partners such as the Library and Overleaf (online LaTeX editor). Please check the Library events page for courses on LaTex, or contact Overleaf directly.

Many students have also found useful tips for dealing with specific problems by entering keywords such as "LaTeX formatting table captions" in their favorite search engines.

Most Common LaTeX to PDF Problem

The most common problem we see with Electronic Theses & Dissertations (ETDs) created in LaTeX is the altering of the page size, particularly an increase of the bottom margin to more than one inch, and sometimes an accompanying decrease in the top and/or right margins to less than the requisite one inch. Less frequently, there will also be problems with figures disappearing or changing appearance. The sizing error may be introduced inadvertently during the conversion from .dvi to .pdf or .ps when the program doing the converting defaults to the A4 European page size. Always check your PDF file after conversion, even if your source file looked perfect.

The following fixes have been found by your fellow Tech graduate students and passed along to the Graduate Thesis Office. We hope they help you:

  • First, before converting the .tex file to .dvi, make sure the class header file in your .tex file says something like "\documentclass[12pt, letter]{article}".
  • If you are converting the resulting .dvi file to a .ps file, be sure the dvips options specify "-P pdf -t letter".
  • When you are converting to .pdf from either the .dvi file directly or from a .ps file, locate the C:\texmf\dvipdfm\config\config\ or analogous folder for PDFs in your system. Replace the line "p a4" with "p letter".

Check our frequently asked questions (FAQ) to see if your question has already been answered. Else, contact Graduate Education at [email protected] .

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Alexander Fabisch

Latex for dissertations.

Since writing a dissertation is usually something that you do only once, I gathered a lot of knowledge that I probably won't need anymore. This is a brief summary of how the LaTeX code of my dissertation is structured. I hope it can be an inspiration for someone else. As I used continuous integration to automatically build the PDF and check PDF/A-1b validity, I will also talk about this in the end.

Include vs. Input

If you want to split your LaTeX code into multiple files you can use ' \input ' or ' \include '.

will have the same effect as copying everything from mychapter.tex here.

will create a page break before it includes the file. It does not work in the preamble though. The benefit of \include is that you can put

in the preamble to only compile a selected subset of all chapters to make compilation much faster. It does not mess up the references (e.g., table of contents, bibliography, and glossary). This can be used if you work on a specific chapter. I found this out at the end of writing my thesis. That is why I put it in the beginning here. Don't make the same mistake. This will save you lots of time.

I use \input for everything in the preamble (e.g., package imports, glossary entries) and \include for my chapters.

Document Class

I highly recommend to use the book class of Koma-Script for a dissertation. This is my configuration for the final document. One of the more obscure options here is ' headings=twolinechapter ', which will print "Chapter X." in a separate line before the title of a chapter. ' listof=totoc,listof=chapterentry ' will add lists of tables and figures as chapters to the table of contents.

I recommend to use Koma-Script in combination with the following package:

This will fix some common problems

  • Documentation: Koma-Script ‘book’ class

Document Structure

This is the overall structure of the LaTeX document.

A large document is often split into (1) something before the main text (front matter), (2) main text (main matter), and (3) something after the main text (back matter).

This is everything before the main text. ' \frontmatter ' will activate roman page numbers and deactivate chapter numbering.

' \mainmatter ' will switch to Arabic page numbers and turn on chapter numbering. So here we have all the main text with numerous subdivisions. I avoided to have less than two subdivisions per level. If you have, e.g., a section with only one subsection, you should think about whether you really need a subsection here. You might want to integrate the subsection in the section or make a new section instead of a subsection.

' \appendix ' will switch chapter numbering to letters.

' \backmatter ' will turn of chapter numbering. Putting the list of figures and tables to the end is unusual. These typically are part of the front matter. I found it to distracting at the beginning though and put it to the end. We will come to the glossary and the bibliography later.

  • Explanation of document structure

Bibliography and Citations

Although I used bibtex before, I chose to use biber and biblatex for my thesis.

The main reason for this decision is that it allows to easily create environments for which you can generate a specific bibliography. I used this feature to generate for each chapter a list of corresponding publications. Here is an example:

The option ' natbib ' ensures that you can use ' \citep{key} ' to generate citations of the form '(Names et al., Year)' and ' \citet{key} ' to generate 'Names et al. (Year)'.

Now you have to run ' biber documentname ' (without file ending) after the first pass of your LaTeX engine. A useful feature of biber is that it can also check your .bib files for validity with ' biber --tool -V literature.bib '.

For better line breaks I used the command ' \sloppy ' before the complete bibliography. Otherwise I had many lines (URLs, DOIs, etc.) that would go over the text borders. It allows more space between words though.

Note that "[w]hen using babel [...] with biblatex, loading csquotes is recommended to ensure that quoted texts are typeset according to the rules of your main language." ( source )

csquotes is also good if you want to quote in the text:

or as a new block:

  • Package documentation: biblatex
  • Biblatex Cheat Sheet
  • Package documentation: csquotes

List of Abbreviations and Acronyms

In smaller documents it is easy to keep track of abbreviations and whether you already introduced them or not. With a document exceeding 100 pages I would suggest to use tools that support a proper glossary. LaTeX can do this automatically.

To create a glossary you have to call

in the document. Then you can define abbreviations with

will result in "Markov Decision Process (MDP) or MDPs" (' \glspl ' means plural). The abbreviation will be introduced once and then only the abbreviation will be printed. No need to think about it. Later in the document you can print the glossary with

The package option ' toc ' will add it to the table of contents.

Note that the external command ' makeglossaries documentname ' (without file ending) has to be executed after the first pass of your LaTeX engine.

  • Package documentation: glossaries

Document Layout

There are several packages that can help you to fine-tune the layout.

This package provides the command \layout that will print page layout variables for your document. This is the result in my case (shows both sides):

If you want to find out specific dimensions in the unit that you are interested in, the following package is useful:

For example, put

in the document for millimeter. I found it useful to find out the text dimensions and then scale figures appropriately without rescaling them in LaTeX.

A good way to check if there are any overfull horizontal boxes is the ' showframe ' option of the geometry package:

This will draw lines around the important areas of each page.

The following package allows you to draw a grid on every page to precisely place elements.

  • Package documentation: layout
  • Package documentation: layouts
  • Package documentation: eso-pic

The Mean Printer and Marginal Notes

I printed my dissertation on my own. It turned out that the printer that I used (with the specific driver that I used) didn't print 4.23 mm at each side of the paper. Unfortunately, I had some marginal notes that the printer wouldn't print completely; one and a half letter were missing. I fixed that by setting

after using the layout package to find out the previous marginparwidth and converting 4.23 mm to pt according to this table . Since there was now less space for the margin notes, LaTeX couldn't find a good way to break lines and I modified my command to make notes on the margin to

which works only with Koma-Script in this form. The text is smaller and it is aligned to the direction of the page's center. But the conclusion of this should be: check the printer before you print!

If you use pdflatex and have to write accented characters (and this is very likely if you want to cite anything from authors with Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, ... names) you should better import the fontenc package before inputenc. It enables proper hyphenation of words that contain accented characters and allows to copy those characters from the output document. If you want to write your thesis in UTF-8 you should import inputenc. This is not required if you build your thesis with a UTF-8 based engine like lualatex though.

  • Package documentation: fontenc
  • Package documentation: inputenc
  • Why should I use fontenc?

This is required in my thesis because it is written in English but has a German summary in the beginning because this is required by my university.

Babel changes the language of a document, that is, translates "table of contents", "chapter", citations, and dates if the default language is not English. It will also apply proper hyphenation to the text. It is possible to use multiple languages. The default language is the last option of the package. We can switch to other languages per section with

  • Package documentation

Figures and Illustrations

This is something that you usually should not do, but sometimes I found it aesthetic to extend a figure a bit on one side:

Note that this is for an image on a left page. On a right page you have to play around with \oddsidemargin and \leftmargin .

  • Package documentation: chngpage

Full Page Image

This package provides the command ' \thisfloatpagestyle ' to remove the header and the page number and I used it for large figures that fill an entire page.

  • Package documentation: floatpag

Barrier for Figures

Precise figure placement is hard.

This package provides the command

that prevents floats from moving past this line. I found this useful to force LaTeX to make a page with multiple figures.

  • Package documentation: placeins

Figure Surrounded by Text

Example (figure on the right side):

  • Package documentation: wrapfig

Multiple Subfigures

In papers, you often see floats that consist of multiple figures that were arranged manually, for example, with a tabular environment. You don't have to do that. Use this package.

It provides the command ' \subfloat ':

If you have multiple subfigures with different heights it is difficult to arrange them vertically. There is a package for that.

Now, to arrange two figures vertically at the center, you can use the option ' valign=m ' of ' \includegraphics ' that is provided by adjustbox and you should add a phantom box of the size of the second figure to the first one.

  • Package documentation: subfig
  • Package documentation: adjustbox
  • Vertical alignment

More Beautiful Tables

Here (in particular slide 8) is a good guide on how to make nice tables.

Table over Multiple Pages

In a few cases I had to make tables that are longer than one page.

You can define a table head that appears on every page (everything before ' \endhead ').

The rules are defined in the package booktabs.

  • Package documentation: longtable
  • Package documentation: booktabs

Code Listing

For code formatting I use the following package:

  • Package documentation: listings

I use the following two packages to typeset pseudocode.

An algorithm in a float environment looks like this.

  • Wikibook LaTeX on pseudocode

A font similar to Times New Roman for math. The package also provides several typical mathematical symbols. Thus, it collides with amssymb and you can't use both. This is how the result looks like:

To change the appearance of ' \mathcal ' I use the following package:

  • Package documentation: newtxmath
  • Package documentation: euscript

For consistent appearance of units I highly recommend this package.

Now you can write in your text:

and much more complex units. You also don't have to think about whether you had put a space between the number and the unit before. The package automatically does this for you.

  • Package documentation: siunitx

I found it useful to put notes in the PDF output.

Use the option [disable] for final version.

You can also print a list of all notes with

  • Package documentation: todonotes

Beginning of a Chapter

I like to put a related quote at the beginning of a chapter. You can do that with the scrbook class.

Another chapter looks like this at the beginning:

There are two elements here. The first one is the style of the heading, which can be defined in scrbook like this:

The image at the top is included with tikz :

If you want to do this, the image should of course be somewhat related to the content of the chapter.

Widows and Orphans

"In typesetting, widows and orphans are lines at the beginning or end of a paragraph which are left dangling at the top or bottom of a page or column, separated from the rest of the paragraph." ( Wikipedia ) A single line at the top or bottom of a page is just not aesthetic and we want to avoid that. The simplest trick is to set high penalties for them globally in the preamble (which means before ' \begin{document} '):

Another trick that I used often is to enlarge a page by one line with

It looks better if both the left and right page have the same length, so I typically extended them both.

  • Widows (TeXFAQ)

Prior Publications

Although my dissertation is a monograph, large parts of it have been published before. Prior publication must be indicated. This is good scientific practice. Otherwise, for example, survey papers can be distorted. I put marginal notes at the beginning of a chapter or section that refer to publications that the text is based on. At the end of each chapter the corresponding publications are listed. At the same place I describe my contributions and the contributions of my co-authors.

My library requires a specific format for electronic publication of the thesis: PDF/A-1b .

The first step to ensure that your document is compatible is to test for compatibility. There are many tools out there that claim to enable this but many of them don't actually work. The tool that I relied on in the end is veraPDF . Since it is used more as a GUI tool, I had to find something that has a similar functionality but works from a command line to integrate it into continuous integration. For that I use Apache preflight 1.8.16 (available here ), which was compatible to the package openjdk-13-jdk that I used in my Ubuntu 20.04 docker image that I used for continuous integration. I had problems setting up preflight 2.X. Although preflight complains about some issues that veraPDF does not see, these can be ignored so that I could test for PDF/A-1b during continuous integration with good enough certainty.

If you only want to check whether all fonts are embedded, you can use

and check the column emb .

The main problem with PDF/A-1b compatibility are PDF figures. I work a lot with inkscape for illustrations and matplotlib for plots. My solution for this problem is to use ghostscript to convert every PDF that is included in the main document to PDF/A-1b:

To make the main LaTeX document compatible I use the package pdfx, which already takes care of a lot of problems and should be important almost at the beginning:

Package documentation: pdfx

However, this is not enough to fix all problems in my case so that I also had to let ghostscript convert the whole document.

Continuous Integration

I used git for version control and continuous integration to automatically build and validate the latest version of my thesis. I set up a docker container based on a recent Ubuntu to match my system.

You certainly don't need all of these packages (e.g., libreoffice or pdftk). As mentioned previously, preflight was used to check PDF/A-1b compatibility. The docker image is also available as ' af01/dissertation ' from dockerhub.

I used GitLab CI. My setup looks similar to this (some checks are omitted):

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A LaTeX template for Bachelor and Master thesis

mbredel/thesis-template

Folders and files, repository files navigation, a thesis latex-template.

This LaTeX-template might be used to write a bachelor or master thesis at the Computer Science department at h_da University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt. It is based on the fabulous ClassicThesis style template of Andre Miedé . It is adapted to the current style guide for bachelor and master theses in the computer science department of h_da, as outlined in Empfehlungen zur Erstellung wissenschaftlicher Abschlussarbeiten

Table of contents

Two-sided vs. one-sided, bibliographies, table of content, figures, tables, listings, and acronyms, personal data, classicthesis-config.tex, writing abstracts, adding content, changing the citation style, compiling the latex source code, using docker, known issues, configuration.

The LaTeX template can be modified and configured easily using a very limited number of files, namely classicthesis-config.tex , hdathesis-config.tex , and thesis.tex . Only use these three files to modify your LaTeX thesis. Please DO NOT modify the actual LaTeX code for your thesis (as this becomes quite complex and consumes a lot of time). Please find a brief description of the various configuration options below:

The thesis.tex file contains the basic structure and all the chapter-files that contain the actual content of your thesis. Thus, you have to modify this file in order to configure some basic stuff like the language of your thesis. The subsequent section "Adding content" explains how to add content.

The default output of the LaTeX thesis template is a single-sided style that also has to be printed that way. In case you want to print two-sided, you have to add the twoside option in the \documentclass definition at line 35:

You may also adapt the paper size ( paper=a4 ) and the font size ( fontsize=11 ) if necessary.

By default all bibliographies that can be referenced in the thesis are put into the bibliography.bib file in the root directory of the LaTeX sources. However, if you want to use additional bibliography files, you may add them to the bibliograph section (starting at line 47) in thesis.tex

The default language of your thesis is German. If you want to switch to English, you have to modify the language selection from ngerman to american at line 63.

While this thesis template supports umlauts, i.e. ÄÖÜäöüß, in the main text of the thesis, there are some issues regarding umlauts on the title page (configured in the personal data at hdathesis-config.tex ). Please see the umlauts section for further details and possible solutions.

By default, the thesis templates prints a lot of table of content, i.e. for figures, tables, listings, and acronyms. You may want to remove such tables if you only have a very limited number, i.e. less than 3-5, of figures, tables, listings, and acronyms. Simply comment the related line in thesis.tex starting at line 81.

hdathesis-config.tex

The hdathesis-config.tex -file allows to configure the usual stuff needed for a thesis at h_da. Namely, you can configure the title of your thesis, your name, the names of your supervisors, dates, etc. Thus, you MUST touch this file and configure it accordingly.

This is where you have to place all the personal stuff of your thesis, starting at line 7.

This thesis template supports German umlauts in the main text. However, if you need umlauts on the title page, say in your title, your name, and your professor's name, you have to use the native LaTeX way of writing umlauts. Please see the following table:

To write the Title "TOR - Schießen mit Füßen" you have to write "TOR - Schie{\ss}en mit F{"u}{\ss}en".

The classicthesis-config.tex -file allows you to configure stuff that comes with the classic-thesis style, like LaTeX packages used by classic thesis. This is quite advanced stuff already. Thus, you should touch this file only if you know what you are doing. Usually, you can leave the file as it is.

In the following, we explain how to actually use, i.e. add content and compile, the thesis template to create a nice and shiny PDF file that will please your supervisor.

Every thesis has to have two abstracts; one in German and one in English. Thus, there are two abstract files included in the thesis.tex -file. Boths files, called AbstractDE.tex for the German abstract and AbstractEN.tex for the English abstract, are located in the ./frontbackmatter/ directory.

You have to modify both these files and place your abstract text in AbstractDE.tex and AbstractEN.tex respectively.

By default, the thesis template, i.e. the thesis.tex -file, contains (includes) some default content files for chapters and appendix from the ./chapters/examples/ -directory (starting a line 94). You have to remove those includes and include your own files. Please note that it is best practice to put all your content in separate files.

You may also want to have a look at the part(...) section at line 93 and 103. You may want to change the titles of the part(...) -sections. Alternatively, you remove the part(...) section and the corresponding cleardoublepage the line before.

By default, this template uses the IEEE Alphabetic style for citatons. The IEEE citation style includes in-text citations in square brackets, which refer to the full citation listed in the reference list at the end of the paper. The reference list is organized alphabetically.

However, if you prefer to uses the old IEEE Numeric style for citations you can do so. To this end, you have to change lines 90 and 91 of classicthesis-config.tex :

You may compile the hda-thesis template using the pdflatex and the bibtex command. In addition, the thesis template repository contains a Makefile that allows you to compile the thesis template using the make tool available on most Unix and Linux systems. Simply type:

to compile the LaTeX code into a PDF-file. Moreover, you may use

to remove all temporary files, which are produced during the compilation process. Finally,

generates a bz2-package file, which contains all the source files of your LaTeX code. In case you need to create a PDF-version with embedded fonts you may use

The h_da thesis template ships with two Dockerfiles that create Docker container used to compile the LaTeX code. One container - built by the Dockerfile.ci Docker file - is used by the CI to compile the thesis template and check its integrity at every commit. The other one - created by the Dockerfile.local Docker file - might be used to build the Docker container that allows to compile the LaTeX code on your local machine without the need to install any LaTeX files.

In order to build the Docker image you have to type the following command:

Creating the image requires a working (and hopefully fast) Internet connection. It may take several minutes to download the required base-images as well as all needed dependencies. You only have to create the image once. Once the image is created, you can run the Docker container by running the following command

inside the root directory containing the LaTeX code. The command mounts the current directory into the Docker container, runs the "publish" make target, and thus compiles the LaTeX code into a PDF file. Finally, the command removes the container again, as it is not needed anymore. You may re-compile the LaTeX code by re-running the "docker run ..." command again.

For more information on Docker, please take a look at the Docker documentation .

  • It has not been tested for MiKTeX and MacTeX yet. Any input on these LaTeX distributions is very welcome.
  • The LaTeX template only supports bachelor theses (by default)
  • The thesis only supports German and (American) English

The h_da computer science department LaTeX thesis template is licenced under GPL v3.0

Acknowledgements

  • Many thanks to Sebastian Jung for his hints on the local Docker approach for compiling the LaTeX code.

Contributors 9

  • Makefile 1.7%

Theses: Thesis format

  • Description
  • Thesis format
  • Parts and content
  • Tools for finding and managing information
  • How to find theses
  • Thesis' deposit
  • Publication of the thesis in TDX
  • Declaration by the author: step by step instructions
  • Doctoral theses completed at UPF Aquest enllaç s'obre en una finestra nova

Access to CAU: Help Desk

ca  | es  | en

These edition and format guidelines are compulsory , unless otherwise stated.

Recommended word processors

  • Formats and templates

Paper and binding

Type and font size, margins and paragraphs.

  • Microsoft Word 
  • Open Office writer 
  • LaTeX 

Thesis can be presented in either of these formats:

latex thesis a4

  • B5 format (ISO 176 mm x 250 mm) [Recommended]
  • DIN A4 format

The templates are just examples , the only compulsory requirements are the ones in this procedure.

  • B5 Word template
  • B5 Open Office template
  • B5 Latex template
  • A4 Word template
  • A4 Open Office template
  • A4 Latex template
  • The paper should preferably be recycled (80-100 g) and must be printed on both sides
  • For the cover, we recommend you use card of approximately 300 g and apply a laminate gloss finish
  • The binding technique used should be perfect binding (with adhesive)

In order to print on paper to ISO B5 size (176 mm x 250 mm) you can use A4 paper and guillotine it to B5 size:  The side margins need to be trimmed by 1.7 cm and the bottom margin by 4.7 cm. 

  • Times New Roman
  • Arial (preferably in upper case)
  • Epigraphs, chapter titles and section titles: 14 points.
  • 11 or 12 points
  • single or 1.5 spacing
  • ​Image captions and footnotes: 10 points.
  • The margins cannot be used for footnotes.
  • The first line of the paragraph should not be indented. However, indentation can be used in some cases, for example for quotations.
  • There should be a one-line space between paragraphs.
  • If you want to separate the footnotes, you can do so in Word as follows: Format > Paragraph > Indents and space> After > 5 pt.
  • ​top and bottom margins: 2,5 cm
  • ​side margins (left and right): 3 cm
  • Top, bottom and side margins must be 3 cm

The academic regulations  on doctoral studies indicate:

Article 13. Language of writing and defence of the doctoral thesis "The thesis may be written and defended in any of the languages commonly used in scientific communication in the relevant field of knowledge. If the language of writing and defence of the thesis is not Catalan, Spanish or English, the doctoral student must notify the academic committee of the doctoral programme of this beforehand."

The cover and the title page must show, in Catalan, the words  "TESI DOCTORAL UPF / year of presentation" and "Directors de la tesi"

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  • Darrera actualització: Jan 26, 2024 2:30 PM
  • URL: https://guiesbibtic.upf.edu/tesis/eng

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  1. Template for LaTeX PhD thesis title page

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  2. Latex Template

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  3. How to write a thesis using LaTeX **full tutorial**

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  4. Sample LaTeX Thesis Template

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  5. [Tex/LaTex] Create a cover for the thesis

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  6. Thesis In Latex Template

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  1. Math Equations in LATEX|SowmyaSuku's Notions

  2. Latex: Thesis Writing: Explained in urdu

  3. How to write thesis in LaTeX P1

  4. L06: Using the Stellenbosch thesis LaTeX template in Overleaf

  5. Research paper writing using LaTeX Overleaf

  6. Latex Thesis Report Template (BracU)

COMMENTS

  1. How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 1): Basic Structure

    The preamble. In this example, the main.tex file is the root document and is the .tex file that will draw the whole document together. The first thing we need to choose is a document class. The article class isn't designed for writing long documents (such as a thesis) so we'll choose the report class, but we could also choose the book class.. We can also change the font size by adding square ...

  2. Basic thesis template

    This LaTeX template includes a title page, a declaration, an abstract, acknowledgements, table of contents, list of figures/tables, a dedication, and example chapters and sections. This template was originally published on ShareLaTeX and subsequently moved to Overleaf in November 2019. This Thesis LaTeX template is an ideal starting point for ...

  3. How to use A4 instead of letterpaper?

    The article class has an option for A4 (210 mm x 297 mm) paper: \documentclass[a4paper]{article} other possible options for page size are: a5paper - A5: 148 mm x 210 mm, that is half of A4, basically. b5paper - B5: 250 mm x 176 mm. letterpaper - Letter: 215.9 mm x 279.4 mm. legalpaper - Legal: 215.9 mm x 355.6 mm.

  4. Page size and margins

    Introduction. The page dimensions in a L a T e X document are highly configurable and the geometry package offers a simple way to change the length and layout of different elements such as the paper size, margins, footnote, header, orientation, etc. . Example. Suppose you need to create a document using A4-sized paper with a text area which shouldn't exceed 6 inches wide and 8 inches high.

  5. Thesis Template

    If the thesis file is something other than MyThesis, then MyThesis should be replaced in the above with the name of the master thesis file.. Nomenclature will be displayed wherever the macro \printnomenclature is called. The width of the first column can be defined by including an optional width (e.g. \printnomenclature[2cm]).The nomenclature section contains the following preamble:

  6. Writing a thesis in LaTeX

    The following article summarizes the most important aspects of writing a thesis in LaTeX, providing you with a document skeleton (at the end) and lots of additional tips and tricks. Document class. The first choice in most cases will be the report document class: 1. \documentclass[options]{report} See here for a complete list of options.

  7. Writing a Thesis in LaTeX

    The guidelines for theses to be submitted to the University of Nottingham specify that: the document should be presented on single-sided a4 paper and typeset in a double-spaced size 10-12 font; the left-hand margin should be at least 1.5 inches (4cm) to allow for binding;

  8. LibGuides: Overleaf for LaTeX Theses & Dissertations: Home

    Writing a thesis or dissertation in LaTeX can be challenging, but the end result is well worth it - nothing looks as good as a LaTeX-produced pdf, and for large documents it's a lot easier than fighting with formatting and cross-referencing in MS Word. Review this video from Overleaf to help you get started writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a ...

  9. PDF Writing a Master's Thesis in LaTeX

    The LaTeX document class kulemt. The document class kulemt can be used to generate a master's thesis text which is conform to the guidelines of the KU Leuven Faculty of Engineering. It is actually an extension of the memoir document class [20], which already includes the functionality of the most useful LaTeX packages.

  10. PDF Writing a thesis with LATEX

    1. For good readability on A4 and letter paper it is advisable to use a base font size of 11 pt. 2. Information on how to use these commands is reported in sec.3. 3. Unfortunately most students try to use every typographic trick to increase the number of pages of their thesis (widening the margins, increasing the font size, increasing the line ...

  11. Page layout

    The basic LaTeX command \documentclass activates default layout, specific for each document class (e.g. article or book ). The oneside and twoside options of \documentclass adjust page layout for the one- and two-sided printing, respectively. Together with options a4paper and 11pt (defining the dimensions of a paper and the value of \normalsize ...

  12. How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 2): Page Layout

    In the first line we've entered a blank \fancyhead command which clears all the header fields. In the second line we've told LaTeX that we want the text "Thesis title" on the right-hand side of the header for the odd pages and the left for even pages. The third line clears the footer fields using a blank \fancyfoot command.

  13. Using Templates on Overleaf

    (If your University has an official thesis template published on Overleaf, you can customize this box accordingly with a link to the template) Write your thesis using the official 'Name of University goes here' thesis template Find your University's template on Overleaf here (insert link to official LaTeX thesis template on Overleaf Gallery or custom Overleaf institutional portal template page).

  14. Thesis Templates

    Current Students. Theses & Dissertations. Thesis Templates. The following thesis format templates should help you get started with formatting your thesis or dissertation. Georgia Tech provides free Overleaf Professional accounts for all students, faculty, and staff who would like to use the collaborative, online LaTeX editor for their projects.

  15. Alexander Fabisch

    LaTeX for Dissertations. So 04 Oktober 2020. By Alexander Fabisch. Category: Blog. Since writing a dissertation is usually something that you do only once, I gathered a lot of knowledge that I probably won't need anymore. This is a brief summary of how the LaTeX code of my dissertation is structured. I hope it can be an inspiration for someone ...

  16. a4paper, where should I declare it? In document class or geometry?

    I currently have an article document class and I previously changed it to include printing on A4 paper: \documentclass[12pt, a4paper]{article} However, I had to change my margins to meet my university requirements and the answer I received used A4 in the geometry package too. \geometry{a4paper,margin=15mm,bindingoffset=25mm,heightrounded,}

  17. GitHub

    A thesis LaTeX-template. This LaTeX-template might be used to write a bachelor or master thesis at the Computer Science department at h_da University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt. It is based on the fabulous ClassicThesis style template of Andre Miedé. It is adapted to the current style guide for bachelor and master theses in the computer ...

  18. How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX

    Here we provide a guide to getting started on writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard template which is pre-loaded into Overleaf. We have a large number of thesis templates in our online library, and you can upload your own if your university provides a set of LaTeX template files. We'll assume you've used LaTeX before and so are ...

  19. Gallery

    This is a non-official MS Thesis Template for NYU Tandon. Following the most recent guidelines of 2023, I updated the NYU PhD Dissertation template to match the MS Thesis Guidelines. Produce beautiful documents starting from our gallery of LaTeX templates for journals, conferences, theses, reports, CVs and much more.

  20. Thesis format

    Thesis can be presented in either of these formats: B5 format (ISO 176 mm x 250 mm) [Recommended] DIN A4 format. The templates are just examples, the only compulsory requirements are the ones in this procedure. B5 Word template. B5 Open Office template. B5 Latex template. A4 Word template. A4 Open Office template.

  21. Optimal margins for a thesis written in Latex

    This time i want to improve the layout of my work. I tried out Bernhards suggestions for ordinary and neater printing. Personally, i found to not quite like the large margins on the sides of my text. So i chose 2cm for the outer margins and 1.2cm for the inner margins with a adaptive binding offset of 4-8mm, depending on how many pages i will ...

  22. How to change thesis template to from A4 to B5?

    1. I am using a template for my PhD thesis, but I have a problem with margins. The default is a4paper, but I want put it on b5 size. % Set up the document: \documentclass[a4paper, 12pt, twoside, openright]{Thesis} % Use the "Thesis" style, based on the ECS Thesis style by Steve Gunn. I changed "a4paper" by "b5paper" but it doesn't work.

  23. Templates

    A modern dissertation (or thesis) LaTeX template. Originally used during my D.Phil. at the University of Oxford. Now updated to be used by students at the University of Malta. Easily customizable, so trivial to change colours and logos for your own institution.