Department of Engineering

PhD/MPhil Thesis - a LaTeX Template

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Contents

• Download
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Installation Notes

It is largely for students writing their fourth year projects, first year PhD reports or the PhD thesis itself. It has been written in a generic fashion to allow easy use and adaption to cater for the needs of different students, departments and also universities.

By simplying dropping your latex text code in the relevant sections (such as introduction, conclusions etc.), you'll be able to quickly produce a thesis document. The template cuts out all the mundane tasks for fidgeting with the settings to make the book class into a thesis.

• the same source code compiles whether you are running it under windows, linux or mac;
• the same source code also compiles whether you are running latex2e and/or pdftex;

The template includes:

• all necessary directories appropriately referenced in main thesis.tex document;
• a sample thesis directory structure with sub-directories (appropriately referenced) for figures;
• handling of .eps, .ps and .png, .jpg and .pdf graphics files;
• a Makefile to produce .dvi, .ps and .pdf files;
• compiled thesis.dvi , thesis.ps , thesis.pdf files;
• Download Tarball (2 MB) or, Download Zip (1 MB)

Please feel free to use and modify it for your own non-commercial purpose and in line with GNU General Public License

The template is very well annotated and examples are given demonstrating the relative ease with which you can change stuff to meet your own needs. As such, I have not written a Help document. I hope you find great use of it :-)

Frequently Asked Questions (by Tim Love)

The template uses several LaTeX packages. You can find out how to change many things by looking at these packages' documentation - it's online and details. Here are a few common issues

• how do you make the references not red and the links to Figures not blue in the pdf? - the thesis package uses several common packages, in particular the hyperref package. In Classes/CUEDthesisPSnPDF.cls there's a command line that loads in this package and sets some options, which you can change as you wish. In this case the relevant lines are

                   colorlinks = true,
                   linkcolor = blue,
                   urlcolor  = blue,
                   citecolor = red,
  

  Either set the colors to black or set colorlinks to false.
• How can I had square brackets around references, and the references by number? - The natbib package is used. In the Classes/CUEDthesisPSnPDF.cls file change

     \usepackage[round, sort, numbers, authoryear]{natbib}
  

  (at about l.39) to

     \usepackage[square, sort, numbers, authoryear]{natbib}
  

  In the thesis.tex file you need to have

   \bibliographystyle{Classes/CUEDbiblio}
  

  as the only active bibliographystyle line
• How can I have numbered references sorted by order of their appearance in the document? - In the thesis.tex file, try

   \bibliographystyle{unsrtnat}
  

  or

   \bibliographystyle{unsrt}
  

• Some headers aren't quite on the right page - (the following is from the fancyhdr documentation) note that the * forms of the \chapter etc. commands do not call the mark commands. So if you want your preface to set the header info but not be numbered nor be put in the table of contents, you must issue the \markboth command yourself, e.g.

  \chapter*{Preface\markboth{Preface}{}}
  

  Entering the \markboth command inside the \chapter* insures that the mark will not be separated from the title by a page break.

Installation Notes (by Tim Love)

Once you've downloaded the files, try changing the name of thesis.pdf then running

  make thesis.pdf

to produce a new version. If this results in an error message

   ! Undefined control sequence.
   l.88 \printglossary
              %% Print the nomenclature
   ? 

then you have a newer nomenclature package than the template was designed for. The easiest fix is to

• find the \usepackage{nomencl} line in the thesis class file (maybe Classes/CUEDthesisPSnPDF.cls) and replace it by \usepackage[compatible]{nomencl}
• remove the intermediate files generated by LaTeX (in particular thesis.gls) and remove thesis.pdf
• try the make command again

   Output written on thesis.pdf (19 pages, 224756 bytes).
   Transcript written on thesis.log.

then a thesis.pdf file has been produced that you can read with Acrobat Reader, etc, and you're ready to write your document.

Note also that

• The files should work ok with front-ends like Texnic, but to get nomenclature features, etc, working you'll need to set makeindex as a postprocessor (thanks go to Robin Cole for finding this)
• On July 31st 2007 the files were updated to use the ifpdf package which provides more robust PDF output detection
• Here are some notes on nomenclature production (which assume that your main file is called thesis.tex). You'll need to know which version of the nomenclature package you're using. To find that out you could try using the package then looking in the resulting *.log file. It should contain a line something like

         Package: nomencl 2005/09/22 v4.2 Nomenclature package (LN)
  

  • If you use a pre-version4 version of the nomenclature package then all will work ok.
  • If you have a newer version of the nomenclature package (version 4 or higher) the easiest thing to do is find the \usepackage{nomencl} line in the thesis class file (maybe Classes/CUEDthesisPSnPDF.cls) and replace it by \usepackage[compatible]{nomencl} because the class file uses the old names for the nomenclature-related commands. You'll need to have the new nomencl.ist installed as well as the new nomencl.sty. Again, all should work ok.
  • If for some reason you have to use version 4 or higher of the nomenclature package without the back-compatible option, then you'll have to work harder.
    1. Note that \makeglossary (\makenomenclature in the new version) puts the nomenclature-related info into thesis.glo (or maybe thesis.nlo in the new version) so if this file is empty after running latex on a file with nomenclature entries in it, something is wrong.
    2. You need to run

            makeindex thesis.glo -s nomencl.ist -o thesis.gls
       

       or (maybe with the new version)

            makeindex thesis.nlo -s nomencl.ist -o thesis.nls
       

       after running latex. This uses the info in thesis.*lo to create latex code in thesis.*ls for the next latex run. Note that each time you add entries to your nomenclature list, you have to go through the same process, running "latex ..." and "makeindex ...".
    3. Use \printglossary for the old nomenclature package (or \printnomenclature if you're using a new version) to read in thesis.*ls when thesis.tex is latex'd again.
    4. It's possible for certain combinations of nomenclature entries to trigger a bug in the class file. If you get an error message about unexpected items in a glossary, try changing the nomgroup redefinition in the class file to the following (brackets have been adjusted).

       \renewcommand\nomgroup[1]{%
         \ifthenelse{\equal{#1}{A}}{%
          \item[\textbf{Roman Symbols}] }{%             A - Roman
           \ifthenelse{\equal{#1}{G}}{%
            \item[\textbf{Greek Symbols}]}{%             G - Greek
             \ifthenelse{\equal{#1}{R}}{%
               \item[\textbf{Superscripts}]}{%              R - Superscripts
                 \ifthenelse{\equal{#1}{S}}{%
                  \item[\textbf{Subscripts}]}{%             S - Subscripts
               \ifthenelse{\equal{#1}{X}}{%
                \item[\textbf{Other Symbols}]}{%    X - Other Symbols
               \ifthenelse{\equal{#1}{Z}}{%
                \item[\textbf{Acronyms}]}%              Z - Acronyms
                               {{}}}}}}}}