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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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Copyright © 2005-2024 David Winterbottom Content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 .

• Basic remarks
• Bitmap fonts
• Page layout
• Bibliography
• Footnote citing

Tips on Writing a Thesis in LaTeX

At the beginning of the thesis typesetting I used only one typeface — default LaTeX font, computer modern roman (CMR; see also Latin Modern ):

After several months of working with 11pt CMR both on screen and paper, I have decided to look for some alternative, because CMR text appeared to me too " light ". A brief search resulted in finding a good collection of free LaTeX fonts, where besides the font appearance one can get information on the installation and activation of a particular font in LaTeX. After few weeks of trying different fonts from that collection, I have stopped my choice on Bitstream Charter (Charter BT) as the font for the "body" text:

Compared to other fonts, one of the things I really like in Charter is its good scalability but I would not say this about bold Charter, at least scalability of particular characters on screen . As a result, Charter has a relatively nice appearance on the screen at different magnification levels, which are typical if you work with PDF file in window or in "fit width" / "fit visible" / etc. display modes. The good scalability can be attributed both to the font "heaviness" and the design of Charter, which was optimized for low resolution laser printers.

The only thing I could complain about Charter is its "fancy" appearance of math :) which I did not like at all:

I was looking for some alternative for the math typesetting (i.e., text placed between $ characters, and in the equation environment ) and finally decided to stay with the original CMR version of the math:

As you see, use of the two aforementioned commands allows to typeset main text with Charter while math with CMR. The expert option of the mathdesign package can be omitted, but in this case I had issue with small capital characters (mainly used for author names in bibliography ) — they were replaced by the normal ones.

After having some experience with the combination of Charter and CMR for text and math respectively, I can point out the following problems inherent to such combination of fonts with different weight :

• writer has to decide which numbers to process as a normal text and which in math mode: the choice is not always trivial, and this most likely will result in different (CMR/Charter) typesetting of numbers in situations with similar context.

Greek "mu" story

After switching the math mode font I have faced issues with Greek symbols which had to be typeset in the main (non-math) text. The issues occurred because Greek symbols are typically typeset in LaTeX via math mode (which was in CMR instead of Charter). A particular example of using Greek symbol in the main text was Greek non-italic "mu" (μ) typeset in Charter to indicate prefix "micro-" in the text. The solutions I have found suggested to use packages upgreek , gensymb , and/or textcomp together with \upmu and \textmu commands. Unfortunately, none of these combinations gave positive result, and LaTeX produced either non-italic CMR or italic Charter Greek mu:

After trying different approaches, I came up with the following solution:

The idea behind the last command set is to define a new command ( \charmu ) which locally changes math font from CMR to Charter and types "mu". With the \DeclareMathVersion { ... } command (see p. 13 in LaTeX 2e font selection ) a new math font version mathchartertext is defined, \SetSymbolFont { ... } customizes the mathchartertext to have non-italic Charter, and \newcommand { \charmu }{ ... } specifies the new command to be used to enter Greek "mu" with the font settings of mathchartertext . The presented solution is probably not the most elegant one :), but this is only how I managed to get it working.

The limitation of \charmu is that it prints only the predefined Greek character ("mu"). After the following modification any Greek character can be printed as non-italic Charter:

The command \charmu (or \gchar ) does not work in the titles of references in the bibliography . The workaround here is to use \mathversion { mathchartertext } right before \printbibliography command (which actually outputs bibliographic records cited in the main text), and to use standard $ \mu $ to get Charter Greek "mu" in the titles of bibliographic records.

In addition to the body text and math mode, I decided to change typeface of the headings (i.e., titles of chapters, sections, sub-, and subsubsections) to the font without serifs (also called sans-serif font). This was done because the headings were typeset in bold and have font sizes larger than the body text; in my opinion serifs of the main font (Charter) in this case should be avoided (actually, bold headings without serifs is a common practice: 1 , 2 , 3 ). To customize the the headings font I have employed titlesec package. Before proceed to the sans-serif headings, I provide two examples containing commands to typeset the headings in Charter and CMR serif fonts. Charter:

Customization is done using the \titleformat command. Its second mandatory parameter ( \usefont { ... } ) actually changes the font, while the second last parameter includes

• \hspace { -0.4pt }  — spacing before the section number ("5.2"),
• \Large  — adjust the font size (notice the space after it),
• \thesection  — section counter (prints the section number),
• \hspace { 0.6pt }  — additional horizontal spacing between the section number and the following section title. (See also notes on spacing .)

The above code can be modified to typeset headings with CMR serif font:

After looking in tug.dk font collection for a suitable serif font for headings, I have stopped my choice at TeX Gyre Heros :

The chosen TeX Gyre Heros is the font not only without serifs, but also has heavier weight compared to Charter — this results in a good visual separation of the headings from the rest text making TeX Gyre Heros a good companion for the body text typeset with Charter. In addition to TeX Gyre Heros, reader may take a look at the bold version of Computer Modern Sans Serif as a candidate for the headings font.

Chapter title font

As stated in its documentation , titlesec package replaces original LaTeX macroses for the heading commands (i.e., \chapter , \section , etc.) which requires assignment of all settings defining the heading command, even if you want to change only one of it (for example, font). This can be seen in the code blocks above where in order to change the heading font with \titleformat command ( \usefont { OT1 }{ cmr }{ bx }{ n } \selectfont } ) settings for the heading number, its location, and its font size were given too ( { \hspace { -0.4pt } \Large \thesection\hspace { 0.6em }} ).

While preparing thesis I decided to modify (i.e., do not redefine) default \chapter macro, and did this with sectsty package. By default, after switching the document font to Charter each chapter title appeared like this:

As discussed above , sans-serif TeX Gyre Heros font was chosen for the headings. Its activation for the chapter titles was done using the following addition to the preamble commands in the code block above:

where not only heading font was changed ( \usefont { T1 }{ qhv }{ b }{ n } \selectfont } ), but also size of the chapter title "Numerical methods" was made smaller using \huge command.

The last command set changed font also in the title of the references list ( bibliography )

Font in table of contents

The commands discussed above change font in the body text, math mode, and headings (including bibliography), but have no influence on the fonts in table of contents (ToC):

Fonts in ToC can be adjusted with the package tocloft , which I actually used:

As you see, font TeX Gyre Heros was used only for the ToC title and headings typeset in bold (which are chapter ones). Charter was kept for the rest of ToC, including bold page numbers of chapters in order to preserve uniformity and flatness of the column with page numbers. Package option [subfigure] was needed to avoid conflict (error at \newcounter { lofdepth } \setcounter { lofdepth }{ 1 } ) with subfigure package if you use it; otherwise this option has to be removed.

The MIT thesis template in LaTeX

The latex template.

The current MIT thesis template was developed in 2023, using up-to-date LaTeX coding, to meet the current formatting requirements of the MIT Libraries. The title and abstract pages are automatically laid out from information provided by the user. This template includes options to use a variety of fonts, and it is compatible with either pdfTeX or unicode engines such as luaLaTeX. When using LaTeX formats dated November 2022 or later, the resulting pdf file meets the PDF/A-2b archivability standard. A standard TeX Live installation includes all other packages required by the template.

This template was written by John Lienhard at the request of the MIT Libraries.

• Documentation: Documentation for the template is available in pdf format here .
• Download: The most current LaTeX files for this template are distributed through the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN): https://ctan.org/pkg/mitthesis Download
• Overleaf.com: A copy of the thesis template is also present in Overleaf.com's template gallery, here . Overleaf includes all the packages in TeX Live, so no additional downloads are needed. Learn more about Overleaf at MIT .

Specifications for MIT theses

The formatting requirements for MIT theses are set by the MIT Libraries, as described at this url: http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/thesis-specs/ . Questions regarding these specifications should be directed to [email protected] .

The original LaTeX 2.09 template was written by Stephen Gildea in the late 1980s (also in CTAN, here ). That template was edited by many later students, leading to the files archived here.

LaTeX has changed greatly since the original MIT thesis template was written. LaTeX 2.09 was replaced by LaTeX2e in 1994. New engines were developed, particularly pdfTeX during the 1990s and Unicode-aware engines in the decades that followed. Many packages and fonts were developed to accompany the original platform, particularly after 2000; and major updates to the LaTeX kernel began in 2018. Over the years, the MIT Libraries have changed the required format several times, especially as electronic thesis submission has become the norm. The original template served MIT well; but by the early 2020s, it was substantially out of date. That situation motivated the creation of this new template.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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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What font should I choose for my thesis?

This post is by DrJanene Carey, a freelance writer and editor based in Armidale NSW. She occasionally teaches academic writing at the University of New England and often edits academic theses, articles and reports. Her website is http://www.janenecarey.com

Arguably, this question is a classic time waster and the student who poses it should be told to just get on with writing up their research. But as someone who edits theses for a living, I think a bit of time spent on fonts is part of the process of buffing and polishing what is, after all, one of the most important documents you will ever produce. Just bear in mind that there is no need to immerse yourself so deeply in the topic that you start quibbling about whether it’s a font or a typeface that you are choosing .

Times New Roman is the standard choice for academic documents, and the thesis preparation guidelines of some universities stipulate its use. For many years, it was the default body text for Microsoft Word. With the release of Office 2007, the default became a sans serif typeface called Calibri. Lacking the little projecting bits (serifs) at the end of characters makes Calibri and its many friends, such as Arial, Helvetica and Verdana, look smoother and clearer on a screen, but generally makes them less readable than a serif typeface when used for printed text . The other problem with choosing a sans serif for your body text is that if you want passages in italics (for example, lengthy participant quotes) often this will be displayed as slanted letters, rather than as a true italic font.

You would like your examiners to feel as comfortable as possible while their eyes are traversing the many, many pages of your thesis, so maximising legibility and readability is a good idea. Times New Roman is ubiquitous and familiar, which means it is probably the safest option, but it does have a couple of drawbacks. Originally designed for The Times in London, its characters are slightly narrowed, so that more of them can be squished into a newspaper column. Secondly, some people intensely dislike TNR because they think it has been overused, and regard it as the font you choose when you are not choosing a font .

If you do have the luxury of choice (your university doesn’t insist you use Times New Roman, and you have defined document styles that are easy to modify, and there’s enough time left before the submission deadline) then I think it is worth considering what other typefaces might work well with your thesis. I’m not a typographical expert, but I have the following suggestions.

• Don’t use Calibri, or any other sans serif font, for your body text, though it is fine for headings. Most people agree that dense chunks of printed text are easier to read if the font is serif, and examiners are likely to expect a typeface that doesn’t stray too far from the standard. To my eye, Calibri looks a little too casual for the body of a thesis.
• Typefaces like Garamond, Palatino, Century Schoolbook, Georgia, Minion Pro, Cambria and Constantia are all perfectly acceptable, and they come with Microsoft Word. However, some of them (Georgia and Constantia, for example) feature non-lining numerals, which means that instead of all sitting neatly on the base line, some will stand higher or lower than others, just like letters do. This looks nice when they are integrated with the text, but it is probably not what you want for a tabular display.
• Consider using a different typeface for your headings. It will make them more prominent, which enhances overall readability because the eye scanning the pages can quickly take in the hierarchy of ideas. The easiest way to get a good contrast with your serif body text is to have sans serif headings. Popular combinations are Garamond/Helvetica; Minion Pro/Myriad Pro; Times New Roman/Arial Narrow. But don’t create a dog’s breakfast by having more than two typefaces in your thesis – use point sizes, bold and italics for variety.

Of late, I’ve become quite fond of Constantia. It’s an attractive serif typeface that came out with Office 2007 at the same time as Calibri, and was specifically designed to look good in print and on screen. Increasingly, theses will be read in PDF rather than book format, so screen readability is an important consideration.  Asked to review Microsoft’s six new ClearType fonts prior to their release, typographer Raph Levien said Constantia was likely to be everyone’s favourite, because ‘Even though it’s a highly readable Roman font departing only slightly from the classical model, it still manages to be fresh and new.’

By default, Constantia has non-lining numerals, but from Word 2010 onwards you can set them to be lining via the advanced font/number forms option, either throughout your document or in specific sections, such as within tables.

Here is an excerpt from a thesis, shown twice with different typefaces. The first excerpt features Calibri headings with Constantia body text, and the second has that old favourite, Times New Roman. As these examples have been rendered as screenshots, you will get a better idea of how the fonts actually look if you try them on your own computer and printer.

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Writing a thesis in LaTeX

Why you should write your thesis in LaTeX? Start here and give it a try!

What is LaTeX, and why should you use it to write your thesis? LaTeX is a typesetting system widely used in academia, particularly for technical and scientific documents, which offers a series of advantages over traditional word processors:

• Superior Typesetting Quality and Consistent Formatting. One of LaTeX’s best qualities is its consistency, which ensures that your thesis not only reads well but also looks professional.
• Great Handling of Mathematical Content. Thesis in STEM fields often involve an extensive use of mathematical formulas and equations. LaTeX provides a powerful equation editor that allows you to write and format complex equations with ease; moreover, referencing them is easy, thanks to the labeling system.
• Efficient Citation Management. Thanks to tools like BibTeX and BibLaTeX, managing references and citations is fast and efficient.
• Flexibility and Customization. LaTeX offers many customization options. You can tailor the appearance of your thesis to meet specific guidelines or personal preferences. You can change the look of a whole document in a matter of seconds, and it will keep its consistency.
• Learning and Community Support. Although LaTeX has a steeper learning curve than traditional word processors, the investment in learning it pays off. Moreover, a vast community of LaTeX users and a wealth of resources are available, including tutorials, templates, and forums where you can seek and share advice.

Ok, but where do I start?

With that said, where should you start when trying to learn LaTeX? In my opinion, the easiest way is to use an online editor like Overleaf , which does not require you to install anything and allows for real-time collaboration for free. This has its limitations (it’s slow at compiling, and the free plan also has a compilation time limit), but it’s a great starting point. Pair this with the hundreds of templates already available on this and other websites, and you will be writing documents in no time.

In this article, I will explain how to use my particular template, which can be found here, but you can try to follow along with similar templates. One I highly suggest taking a look at once you grasp LaTeX basics is Classic Thesis by André Miede.

The Title Page

Once you downloaded the zip and opened it with your preferred editor (on Overleaf, you can start a new project by simply uploading the zip file), you will see the following file structure:

Once you understand how this structure works, you can easily add and remove things. First, let’s change the Title Page! To do so, all you have to do is open the config.tex file: here, you can insert your university name, department, course, title, supervisors’ name, academic year, and your name and matriculation number.

This template uses custom fonts! You will have to change the compiler from pdfLaTeX to either XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX!

To do so in overleaf, click the Menu button in the top left corner. You will find the compiler option in the Settings section.

If you are using VSCode with LaTeX Workshop, I have included the appropriate flag at the start of the document (%!TEX program = lualatex). All you have to do is enabling magic comments by changing the setting forceRecipeUsage to false.

Managing and adding chapters

As you can see, I added a dedication page. You can choose to remove it by removing or commenting the following lines in the main.tex file:

To modify other sections, like the abstract or the introduction, you can go to their respective files: ./frontmatter/abstract.tex and ./chapters/introduction.tex . If you want to add another section, do so by creating the relative tex file in the appropriate folder; then add it to the main document by including it in the main.tex file: \include{path/to/document.tex} .

If you are having troubles with anything, you can refer to the Overleaf tutorials. Usually, you can find everything you may need there. Moreover, I suggest the LaTeX Cookbook by Stefan Kottwitz, a book that teaches you how to solve common problems when using LaTeX.

Customization

You can customize how things look in the SciThesis.cls file. Here, you can manage packages and other layout preferences.

You can customize how theorems, code portions, labels, and other things look.

The easiest thing you can customize is the main color for the Chapters and links:

Here, you can change the RGB definition to any color you want. The default one is teal.

What’s next?

This is just an introductory post to get this template up and running. In the next weeks, I will write more specific tutorials on how to handle common situations you may encounter when writing your thesis, starting with bibliography management.

See you next time!

Top 10 L a T e X Fonts

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This page contains ten paragraphs typeset by the L a T e X typesetting system , converted to images by the dvipng utility. Each paragraph 1 showcases a different font family and provides some background and usage instructions. The source of this page is available on GitHub . All the fonts are free and open source and are included by default in most L a T e X distributions. All fonts are also available on CTAN , as well as in the T e X Font Catalogue .     1 except for this one, which is the only paragraph rendered by your browser.

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Guide to Writing Your Thesis in LaTeX

Step 1: install latex and a latex aware editor.

LaTeX is not a word processor, it is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is most often used for medium-to-large technical or scientific documents, but it can be used for almost any form of publishing. LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the content right.

Because LaTeX source files are just ordinary text files, any text editor can be used to edit them, but it is important to have a LaTeX aware editor. A LaTeX aware editor can do things like syntax highlighting, spell checking, and automatic formatting. It can also run LaTeX on the source files, update the bibliography, then update the document in a viewer all at the click of a button.

Below are links to what you need to get started on various operating systems. Check out the LaTeX Project website for more information.

Your system distribution or vendor has probably provided a LaTeX system. If not, check your usual software source for the texlive package, or otherwise install texlive directly. All of the Linux systems in the ELE Department already have a complete LaTeX system installed.

Two good editors for Linux are Texmaker and TeXstudio .

MacTeX is a full LaTeX system for MacOS which includes an editor.

The editors Texmaker and TeXstudio can also be used.

Microsoft Windows

proTeXt is a full LaTeX system for Windows, which includes MikTeX and an editor. You can also install MikTeX directly with the editor of your choice.

There are numerous good editors for Windows, some of which are TeXnicCenter , Texmaker and TeXstudio .

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• Board index LaTeX Templates Theses, Books, Title pages

LaTeX forum ⇒ Theses, Books, Title pages ⇒ Masters/Doctoral Thesis-Font style-section and subsection

Masters/doctoral thesis-font style-section and subsection.

Post by aswadson » Sun Feb 26, 2017 6:33 pm

Recommended reading 2021:

Post by Johannes_B » Sun Feb 26, 2017 9:12 pm

Post by aswadson » Mon Feb 27, 2017 3:51 pm

Post by aswadson » Tue Feb 28, 2017 2:12 am

Post by Johannes_B » Tue Feb 28, 2017 9:18 am

Return to “Theses, Books, Title pages”

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• Font sizes, families, and styles
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Font sizes
• 3 Font families
• 4 Font styles
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Introduction

LaTeX normally chooses the appropriate font and font size based on the logical structure of the document (e.g. sections). In some cases, you may want to set fonts and sizes by hand.

The following example shows how to use the smallest available font size in LaTeX ( \tiny ) and the small caps ( \textsc{...} ) font style:

 Open this example in Overleaf

Font sizes are identified by special names, the actual size is not absolute but relative to the font size declared in the \documentclass statement (see Creating a document in LaTeX ).

In the following example, {\huge huge font size} declares that the text inside the braces must be formatted in a huge font size. For a complete list of available font sizes see the reference guide .

Font families

By default, in standard LaTeX classes the default style for text is usually a Roman (upright) serif font. To use other styles ( families ) such as sans serif, typewriter (monospace) etc. you need to use some specific LaTeX commands, as shown in the example below:

The following image shows the output produced by the example above:

You can set up the use of sans font as a default in a LaTeX document by using the command:

Similarly, for using roman font as a default:

Font styles

The most common font styles in LaTeX are bold, italics and underlined , but there are a few more.

In the following example the \textsl command sets the text in a slanted style which makes the text look a bit like italics , but not quite. See the reference guide for a complete list of font styles.

If you want to go back to "normal" font style (default for the LaTeX class you are using), this can be done by using the \textnormal{...} command or the \normalfont switch command.

Putting it all together

The following example combines together the various LaTeX code fragments used in this article.

Reference guide

Default font families

Further reading

For more information see:

• Font typefaces
• Supporting modern fonts with XeLaTeX
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LaTeX Basics

• Creating your first LaTeX document
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An academic thesis, also known as a dissertation, is a substantial work produced by a graduate student to communicate their research and earn a degree. A thesis will typically include a review of the current state of research in the field of study followed by a central hypothesis to be investigated. The bulk of the thesis will then focus on the methods and results of the research performed, followed by a discussion on how the results add to the field in general. Theses are long, highly structured and include a lot of advanced document elements.

This template is designed for writing books and graduate-level theses and provides numerous examples and documentation to enable complex requirements. The design features a relatively narrow main text column with an adjacent wide margin to house notes, figures, tables, citations and captions.

• View Template Information

Masters/Doctoral Thesis

This template provides a full framework for writing a graduate level thesis. It is carefully structured and separated into multiple parts for easy editing. Included are the following pages/sections: a cover page, declaration of authorship, quotation, abstract, acknowledgements, contents page(s), list of figures, list of tables, abbreviations, physical constants, symbols, dedication, example chapter, example appendix and bibliography.

Classicthesis Typographic Thesis

This template has been designed as a homage to the Elements of Typographic Style. As such, it has an air of efficiency and optimal design. It is suitable for any high-level degree thesis such as for a PhD, Masters or Honors. Sections within the thesis are clearly separated in a consistent way, as are sections within each chapter. The default structure of the thesis proceeds in the following order: title page, dedication, abstract, publications, acknowledgements, contents, list of tables/figures/listings, acronyms, content chapters, appendices, bibliography, colophon and declaration.

Maggi Memoir Thesis

This template uses the memoir document class to beautifully typeset a thesis. It is suitable for any high-level degree thesis such as for a PhD, Masters or Honors. The layout of the content is in a thin format to promote easy reading and the template features advanced specification of margins and trimming. The thesis boasts a professional look which is immediately obvious from the title page itself and carries through the design of the rest of the document. Three custom fonts are used in the template to match the design and beautifully display your content.

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How to write a Thesis with font of size 14pt? [duplicate]

I want to write my thesis in latex, with a font of size 14pt. I wrote

but the font is not of 14pt. Can someone tell me how can I write with 14pt? Thank you!

• memoir suport 14 pt fonts. Beside this it also has many other features which can be handy ... –  Zarko Commented Jun 19, 2017 at 20:04
• @Huang_d if I try to use extsize package, it tells me that "MiKTeX encountered an internal error." –  g.pomegranate Commented Jun 19, 2017 at 20:07
• @g.pomegranate Great! I then suggest you to ask a new question about this specific issue. Please remember to add a minimal working example (MWE) that illustrates your problem. Reproducing the problem and finding out what the issue is will be much easier when we see compilable code, starting with \documentclass{...} and ending with \end{document} . –  ebosi Commented Jun 19, 2017 at 22:12

The book class supports only 10 , 11 , and 12 pt sizes. You need the extbook to be able to use 14pt . Better options exist, like scrbook or the memoir class, both support 14pt size out of the box.

• If a I put extbook, it tells me: "MiKTeX encountered an internal error." –  g.pomegranate Commented Jun 19, 2017 at 20:08
• Package extsizes.sty ? –  Johannes_B Commented Jun 24, 2017 at 14:39

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged thesis .

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