latex document class for thesis

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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LaTeX-Tutorial.com

Your guide to documentclass latex: types and options, what is documentclass latex.

Every LaTeX document starts with a \begin{document} command and ends with an \end{document} command. LaTeX ignores anything that follows the \end{document}. The part of the source code file that precedes the \begin{document} declaration is called the preamble .

The first command of the preamble has to be \docummentclass (although technically it can be preceded with prepended files). This command takes a single mandatory argument that is one of the predefined classes of document that LaTeX has built-in. In this tutorial, we are going to explain and see the differences and similarities of these document classes , and what should each one be used for. We will also talk about the multiple optional arguments that the \documentclass command takes, and that can be used to customize the appearance of our document .

There are also third-party document classes that are written and distributed as external packages. Some of these classes, like beamer to make presentations and memoir to extend the functionalities of the book class , are very popular and useful, but we won’t cover them here, since they are much more sophisticated and complex than the predefined classes.

LaTeX document classes and their use

The document classes available in plain LaTeX are reported in the following table:

• The first two document classes are the basic ones; if you don’t know what document class you should use, always start with article .
• The report class is very similar, the main difference with the article being that you can insert chapters with \chapter, while in the article class the highest element in the hierarchy of titles is the \section command .

LaTeX book class

In typographical standards, books differ from reports mainly in their front and back matter. The front matter of a book usually includes:

• a half-title page,
• a main title page,
• a copyright page,
• a preface or foreword, and a table of contents.

It may also contain:

• acknowledgments,
• a dedication,
• a list of figures,
• a list of tables,
• a list of other books in the same series, and other editorial or promotional content.

The back matter usually includes an index and may contain an afterword, also acknowledgments, a bibliography, a colophon, and so on.

The book document class provides some commands to produce the logical structures previously discussed, that the report class isn’t able to deal with by default . However, it does not try to yield tools to all of them. Individual publishers usually have their own packages with additional commands to typeset the structures according to their manual of style.

Front matter, main matter and back matter commands

The front matter, main matter (which contains the main body of the book, starting at the first chapter or part and ending at the appendices), and back matter are begun with the three commands \frontmatter, \mainmatter, and \backmatter, respectively.

In the standard book class, front matter pages are numbered with roman numerals; main and back matter pages are numbered with arabic numerals.

In the front and back matter, the \chapter command does not produce a chapter number, but it does make a table of contents entry; this can be used, for example, to produce a preface or acknowledgments section. Inside these kind of chapters, only the starred versions of other sectioning commands (mainly \section* and \subsection*) should be used.

Illustrative example of Book class

For example, this could be a standard book structure:

You can see the table of contents produced by the previous book in Figure 1. Observe how the numbering of the pages and the sectioning commands change according to the part of the book we are in.

Odd and even pages in Book class

When printing books, odd and even pages are not structured in the same way. Margins, and usually also headers and footers, change to provide better readability when the book is bound. This is taken into account in the book document class, where you will see that:

• left pages have a larger left margin, the page number at the top left of the page, and the title of the current chapter at the right, while
• right pages have a larger right margin and only the page number at the top right of the page. Also, new chapters start always at the right page and the page head is emptied, leaving only the page numb er at the center on the foot of the page.

No built-in abstract

There is one more difference between the book class and the article and report classes : it doesn’t have a built-in abstract environment .

This environment is used in academic articles, and also reports, to give a brief description of the contents that will be treated along with the document. It is customary for this introduction to have special typesetting, with “Abstract” written in bold over it, and also it is common to find it printed just after the title and before the table of contents. As said, this environment is not implemented in the book document class.

Memoir class

It is worth mentioning here that there is a popular extension of the book document class, called memoir, written by Peter Wilson.

This package aims to integrate multiple design-related packages with the LaTeX book class. It provides:

• a larger range of permissible font sizes,
• a large number of page styles, and well
• over a dozen chapter styles to choose from, as well as
• methods for specifying your own layouts and designs.
• It also integrates the functionality of over thirty popular packages.

LaTeX letter class

As with the slide document class, the letter is slightly old-fashioned. This class is used to make traditional letters, the ones that are put in an envelope and mailed, a somewhat obsolete way of communication (since the email was invented and generalized) but still used in certain official matters. Although the class was designed for traditional letters, still today there are certain documents that have the structure of a letter such as:

• a letter of recommendation, or
• a letter of presentation

and for which this document class may be useful. So let’s briefly discuss the details that characterize this particular document class!

With it, you can make any number of letters with a single input file:

• Your name and address, which are likely to be the same for all letters, are specified by special declarations.
• The return address is declared by an \address command, with multiple output lines separated by \\ commands (which is the common line-breaking command in LaTeX).
• The \signature command declares your name, as it appears at the end of the letter, with the usual \\ separating multiple lines.

These declarations are usually put in the preamble because they are common to all letters, but they are normal declarations with the customary scoping rules and can appear anywhere in the document. In particular, this means that you can change the return address and signature at any point.

Each letter is produced by a separate letter environment, having the name and address of the recipient as its mandatory argument.

• The letter itself begins with an \opening command that is used to generate the salutation.
• The main body of the lecture is ordinary LaTeX input.
• The letter closes with a \closing command that is passed the closing sentence and automatically generates the signature.

These may seem a lot of commands, but they are all very easy to use, and also very powerful since LaTeX automatically will take care of the formatting of the letter, without you having to worry about it at all.

In case you are not convinced yet, let me show you a clarifying example where all the commands are put into practice so that you can use it as a template for your letters:

You can see the letter generated in Figure 2. Note how LaTeX automatically formates everything, and even inserts the current date without you asking for it. I find generating letters with LaTeX easier than doing it by hand!

We said that the date on the letters is automatically inserted by LaTeX and that it uses today’s date. We can, however, change this behavior by redefining the \today command, which is where LaTeX saves the name of the day. For example:

\renewcommand{\today}{12th of October of 1492}

will make \today print the content “12th of October of 1492”. This declaration can either be used on the preamble, to affect all letters or inside a certain letter environment, to only affect that letter.

documentclass latex options

As was stated in the introduction, there are some optional arguments that can be passed to the \documentclass command. Here we are going to explain these options:

The options 10pt, 11pt, and 12pt choose the normal type size of the document. The default value is 10pt. This option is not recognized by the slides class.

The paper size can be selected between the following options:

• letterpaper (8.5in × 11in)
• legalpaper (8.5in × 14in)
• executivepaper (7.25in × 10.5in)
• A4 (210mm × 297mm)
• A5 (148mm × 210mm)
• B5 (176mm × 250mm)

By default, the paper size is letterpaper.

The landscape option causes the output to be formatted for landscape printing on the selected paper size. Effectively, this option interchanges the width and the height dimensions of the paper size.

If TeX has trouble finding good places to break lines, it can produce lines that extend past the right margin (which produce the output warnings called “overfull hboxes”). The draft option causes such lines to be marked by black boxes in the output. The final option, which does not mark these lines, is the default.

Two sides printing

The oneside and twoside options format the output to be printed on one side or both sides of a page, respectively. The default is oneside, except for the book class, for which it is twoside. However, the twoside option is not available with the slides document class.

Opening page of chapters

If the openright option is used, then all chapters will begin on a right-hand page. Instead, with the openany option you can make them start on any page. These options apply only to the report class (whose default is openany) and the book class (whose default is openright).

Two column pages

The option twocolumn specifies two-column pages. The default is onecolumn, for one-column pages. The twocolumn option cannot be used with the letter or slides classes.

Page for the title

The titlepage option causes the \maketitle command to make a separate title page and the abstract environment to put the abstract on a separate page. The default is titlepage for all classes except article, for which it is notitlepage. hese options, however, are not recognized by the letter class.

Open bibliography style

openbib causes the bibliography to be formatted in an open style. This option is not recognized by the letter and slides classes.

Numbered formulas

The option leqno puts formula numbers on the left side, instead of the right, which is the default.

Formulas alignment

The option fleqn left-aligns formulas, which by default are centered.

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Research Guides

Submit and publish your thesis.

• The Graduate Thesis: What is it?
• Thesis Defences
• Deadlines and Fees
• Formatting in MS Word

Formatting in LaTeX

• Making Thesis Accessible
• Thesis Embargo
• Review and Release
• Your Rights as an Author
• Re-using Third Party Materials
• Creative Commons Licenses for Theses
• Turning Thesis into an Article
• Turning Thesis into a Book
• Other Venues of Publication

For formatting instructions and requirements see the Formatting section of the School of Graduate Studies website. The thesis style template for LaTeX ( ut-thesis ) implements these requirements. You are not required to use the template, but using it will make most of the formatting requirements easier to meet.

►► Thesis template for LaTeX .

Below are some general formatting tips for drafting your thesis in LaTeX.  In addition, there are other supports available:

• Regular LaTeX workshops are offered via the library, watch the library workshop calendar at https://libcal.library.utoronto.ca/
• With questions about LaTeX formatting, contact Map and Data Library (MDL) using this form
• There are also great resources for learning LaTeX available via Overleaf

Many common problems have been solved on the TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange Q & A Forum

LaTeX Template

To use the LaTeX and ut-thesis , you need two things: a LaTeX distribution (compiles your code), and an editor (where you write your code). Two main approaches are:

• Overleaf : is a web-based platform that combines a distribution (TeX Live) and an editor. It is beginner-friendly (minimal set-up) and some people prefer a cloud-based platform. However, manually uploading graphics and managing a bibliographic database can be tedious, especially for large projects like a thesis.
• A LaTeX distribution can be installed as described here . ut-thesis can then be installed either: a) initially, with the distribution; b) automatically when you try to compile a document using \usepackage{ut-thesis} ; or manually via graphical or terminal-based package manager for the distribution.
• The LaTeX distribution allows you to compile code, but provides no tools for writing (e.g. syntax highlighting, hotkeys, command completion, etc.). There are many editor options that provide these features. TeXstudio is one popular option.

Occasionally, the version of ut-thesis on GitHub  may be more up-to-date than the popular distributions (especially yearly TeX Live), including small bug fixes. To use the GitHub version, you can download the file ut-thesis.cls (and maybe the documentation ut-thesis .pdf ) and place it in your working directory. This will take priority over any other versions of ut-thesis on your system while in this directory.

LaTeX Formatting Tips

Here are a few tips & tricks for formatting your thesis in LateX.

Document Structure

Using the ut-thesis document class, a minimal example thesis might look like:

\documentclass{ut-thesis} \author {Your Name} \title {Thesis Title} \degree {Doctor of Philosophy} \department {LaTeX} \gradyear {2020} \begin {document}   \frontmatter   \maketitle   \begin {abstract}     % abstract goes here   \end {abstract}   \tableofcontents   \mainmatter   % main chapters go here   % references go here   \appendix   % appendices go here \end {document}

►►  A larger example is available on GitHub here .

You may want to consider splitting your code into multiple files. The contents of each file can then be added using \input{filename} .

The usual commands for document hierarchy are available like \chapter , \section , \subsection , \subsubsection , and \paragraph . To control which appear in the \tableofcontents , you can use \setcounter{tocdepth}{i} , where i = 2 includes up to \subsection , etc. For unnumbered sections, use \section* , etc. No component should be empty, such as \section{...} immediately followed by \subsection{...} .

Note: In the examples below, we denote the preamble vs body like:

preamble code --- body code

Tables & Figures

In LaTeX, tables and figures are environments called “floats”, and they usually don’t appear exactly where you have them in the code. This is to avoid awkward whitespace. Float environments are used like \begin{env} ... \end{env} , where the entire content ... will move with the float. If you really need a float to appear exactly “here”, you can use:

\usepackage{float} --- \begin{ figure}[H] ... \end {figure}

Most other environments (like equation) do not float.

A LaTeX table as a numbered float is distinct from tabular data. So, a typical table might look like:

\usepackage{booktabs} --- \begin {table}   \centering   \caption {The table caption}   \begin {tabular}{crll}     i &   Name & A &  B \\     1 &  First & 1 &  2 \\     2 & Second & 3 &  5 \\     3 &  Third & 8 & 13   \end {tabular} \end {table}

The & separates cells and \\ makes a new row. The {crll} specifies four columns: 1 centred, 1 right-aligned, and 2 left-aligned.

Fancy Tables

Some helpful packages for creating more advanced tabular data:

• booktabs : provides the commands \toprule , \midrile , and \bottomrule , which add horizontal lines of slightly different weights.
• multicol : provides the command \multicolumn{2}{r}{...} to “merge” 2 cells horizontally with the content ... , centred.
• multirow : provides the command \multirow{2}{*}{...} , to “merge” 2 cells vertically with the content ... , having width computed automatically (*).

A LaTeX figure is similarly distinct from graphical content. To include graphics, it’s best to use the command \includegraphics from the graphicx package. Then, a typical figure might look like:

\usepackage{graphicx} --- \begin {figure}   \centering   \includegraphics[width=.6 \textwidth ]{figurename} \end {figure}

Here we use .6\textwidth to make the graphic 60% the width of the main text.

By default, graphicx will look for figurename in the same folder as main.tex ; if you need to add other folders, you can use \graphicspath{{folder1/}{folder2/}...} .

The preferred package for subfigures is subcaption ; you can use it like:

\usepackage{subcaption} --- \begin {figure} % or table, then subtable below   \begin {subfigure}{0.5 \textwidth }     \includegraphics[width= \textwidth ]{figureA}     \caption {First subcaption}   \end {subfigure}   \begin {subfigure}{0.5 \textwidth }     \includegraphics[width= \textwidth ]{figureB}     \caption {Second subcaption}   \end {subfigure}   \caption {Overall figure caption} \end {figure}

This makes two subfigures each 50% of the text width, with respective subcaptions, plus an overall figure caption.

Math can be added inline with body text like $E = m c^2$ , or as a standalone equation like:

\begin {equation}   E = m c^2 \end {equation}

A complete guide to math is beyond our scope here; again, Overleaf provides a great set of resources to get started.

Cross References

We recommend using the hyperref package to make clickable links within your thesis, such as the table of contents, and references to equations, tables, figures, and other sections.

A cross-reference label can be added to a section or float environment using \label{key} , and referenced elsewhere using \ref{key} . The key will not appear in the final document (unless there is an error), so we recommend a naming convention like fig:diagram , tab:summary , or intro:back for \section{Background} within \chapter{Intro} , for example. We also recommend using a non-breaking space ~ like Figure~\ref{fig:diagram} , so that a linebreak will not separate “Figure” and the number.

You may need to compile multiple times to resolve cross-references (and citations). However, this occurs by default as needed in most editors.

The LaTeX package tikz provides excellent tools for drawing diagrams and even plotting basic math functions. Here is one small example:

\usepackage{tikz} --- \begin {tikzpicture}   \node [red,circle]  (a) at (0,0) {A};   \node [blue,square] (b) at (1,0) {B};   \draw [dotted,->]   (a) -- node[above]{ $ \alpha $ } (b); \end {tikzpicture}

Don’t forget semicolons after every command, or else you will get stuck while compiling.

There are several options for managing references in LaTeX. We recommend the most modern package: biblatex , with the biber backend.  A helpful overview is given here .

Assuming you have a file called references.bib that looks like:

@article{Lastname2020,   title = {The article title},   author = {Lastname, First and Last2, First2 and Last3 and First3},   journal = {Journal Name},   year = {2020},   vol = {99},   no = {1} } ...

then you can cite the reference Lastname2020 using biblatex like:

\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex} \addbibresource {references.bib} --- \cite {Lastname2020} ... \printbibliography

Depending on what editor you’re using to compile, this may work straight away. If not, you may need to update your compiling command to:

pdflatex main && biber main && pdflatex main && pdflatex main

Assuming your document is called main.tex . This is because biber is a separate tool from pdflatex . So in the command above, we first identify the cited sources using pdflatex , then collect the reference information using biber , then finish compiling the document using pdflatex , and then we compile once more in case anything got missed.

There are many options when loading biblatex to configure the reference formatting; it’s best to search the CTAN documentation for what you want to do.

Windows users may find that biber.exe or bibtex.exe get silently blocked by some antivirus software. Usually, an exception can be added within the antivirus software to allow these programs to run.

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• Next: Making Thesis Accessible >>
• Last Updated: Sep 15, 2023 3:23 PM
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Guide to Writing Your Thesis in LaTeX

Step 4: configure the options specific to your thesis.

At this point, it is assumed that you have a working LaTeX distribution, an editor, have downloaded and installed the necessary template files, and confirmed that you can build this sample thesis . If not, do that first. Now we will explain how to set things like the title, the author name, and whether it is a masters thesis or a doctoral dissertation.

Start by opening the file thesis.tex in your editor.

Setting the Class Options

The first line of the file will be:

This tells LaTeX to use the urithesis document class with all default options. There are many options that that can be given, but for now we will only concern ourselves with one.

If this is a Ph.D. dissertation, change the first line to be:

Setting the Title and Author

To set the title, you use the command:

Make sure to use proper capitalization.

Since you will be the author, set your name using the command:

The tilde between the middle initial and the last name tells LaTeX that the period does not indicate the end of a sentence, and to use a normal interword space.

The Bibliography Source File

The references will come from one or more .bib files that you create. This is the only type of file without a .tex extension that you will need to edit. The line:

tells BibTeX to look in the file references.bib for references cited in the thesis. The argument to the \reffile command can be a comma separated list of files (without the .bib extension), and it will look in all of those files.

The Preliminary Material

The pages that come before the first chapter are called the preliminary material. See the page Guidelines for the Format of Theses and Dissertations , on the Graduate School’s web site, for more information about the preliminary material. The preliminary material includes, in this order:

The automatic sections will be generated automatically, and you need not worry about them. The List of Tables and List of Figures sections will only be generated if the thesis contains any tables or figures, respectively. The argument to the command to include the four manual sections, is the name of the .tex file that contains the content for that section, without the .tex extension. For example the abstract is included with the command:

which means it will us the contents of the file abstract.tex as the abstract. The file abstract.tex should contain only the text of the abstract, as the title will be generated automatically.

The Chapters

Chapters are included with the command:

which will include the file chapterN.tex in the thesis. There should be one \newchapter{} command for each chapter of the thesis.

The chapter source files should each begin with the command

followed by the contents of the chapter.

The Appendices

Appendices are optional, but if present, they are included with the command:

which will include the file appendixN.tex in the thesis. There should be a \newappendix{} command for each appendix of the thesis.

The main difference between appendices and chapters, are that chapters are numbered starting with 1, while appendices start with the letter A. The contents of an appendix is identical to that of a chapter. Each appendix source file should begin with the command:

command, just like with chapters.

Additional Considerations

By default, the department named on the title page is Electrical Engineering, but that can be changed by using the command:

before any of the chapters are included.

The year that the thesis is generated is displayed on the title page and approval page, but the Graduate School requires that year must be the year of your official graduation. To set that date to a specific year, other than the current year, use the command:

before the \begin{document} command.

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:

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LaTeX & BibTeX

• Getting Started
• LaTeX: \DocumentClass Command
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Classes in LaTeX

The first line of code in any LaTeX souce document (in .tex document)  is  - document class declaration command. 

\ documentclass { article }

It is from here that you declare the class of which you like to build your document around. -  you specify what type of document you are working with and output: 

So a document starting   \ documentclass { article }   would generate “an article document”

A wide variety of classes have been implemented and are available online. A small list of some of the major ones are as follows: 

• article - for articles in scientific journals, presentations, short reports, program documentation, etc...
• IEEEtran - for articles with the IEEE Transactions format.
• report - for longer reports containing several chapters, small books, thesis, etc...
• boo k - for real books
• slides - for slides.
• letter - for writing letters.

Examples of Document Classes

In addition to the predefined formatting within a class, the user has the ability to define certain options specific to their document. Class option are to be inserted in between square brackets, [ ] , before the curly braces, {}, that define the class to be used. Multiple options are to be separated by a comma.

\documentclass [ option1,option2 ] { article }

Options available to the user are as follows:

10pt, 11pt, 12pt - Sets the size of the main font in the document. If no option is specified, 10pt is assumed.

a4paper, letterpaper, etc ... - Defines the paper size. The default size is letterpaper; However, many European distributions of TeX now come pre-set for A4, not Letter, and this is also true of all distributions of pdfLaTeX. Besides that, a5paper, b5paper, executivepaper, and legalpaper can be specified.

fleqn - Typesets displayed formulas left-aligned instead of centered.

leqno - Places the numbering of formulas on the left hand side instead of the right.

titlepage, notitlepage - Specifies whether a new page should be started after the document title or not. The article class does not start a new page by default, while report and book do.

onecolumn, twocolumn - Instructs LaTeX to typeset the document in one column or two columns.

twoside, oneside - Specifies whether double or single sided output should be generated. The classes’ article and report are single sided and the book class is double sided by default. Note that this option concerns the style of the document only. The option two side does not tell the printer you use that it should actually make a two-sided printout.

landscape - Changes the layout of the document to print in landscape mode.

openright, openany - Makes chapters begin either only on right hand pages or on the next page available. This does not work with the article class, as it does not know about chapters. The report class by default starts chapters on the next page available and the book class starts them on right hand pages.

draft - makes LaTeX indicate hyphenation and justification problems with a small square in the right-hand margin of the problem line so they can be located quickly by a human. It also suppresses the inclusion of images and shows only a frame where they would normally occur.

As an example, let’s write the document class declaration command for an article with 12pt font and two columns on letter size paper.

        \documentclass [ 12pt,twocolumn,letterpaper ]{ article }

Examples of Document Classes & Options

• Examples of Document Classes \documentclass{letter} \documentclass{article}
• Examples of Document-Class-Options \documentclass[option1, option2, etc.]{article} \documentclass[12pt,twocolumn,letterpaper]{article} Font size [10pt, 11pt, 12pt] Paper size and format [a4paper, letterpaper]
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LaTeX Document Classes: A Comprehensive Guide

LaTeX document class is an essential aspect of LaTeX, a typesetting system commonly used to produce scientific and mathematical documents due to its excellent support for complex equations and formatting. In LaTeX, the document class defines your document’s overall layout and structure . Here’s a guide on how to use LaTeX document classes:

What is Document Class in LaTeX?

LaTeX provides several document classes, each designed for specific types of documents, such as letter , article , report , book , amsart , thesis , slide , slides , and seminar .

Each of these document classes serves a specific purpose and is equipped with features tailored to the unique requirements of different types of documents.

The document class is declared at the beginning of your LaTeX document using the \documentclass{doctype} command. The argument doctype within the {} is obligatory, representing the class or type of the document.

Basic Document Structure

A minimal LaTeX document typically consists of the following structure:

Replace with the desired document class (e.g., letter , article , report , book , amsart , thesis , slide , slides , seminar ).

Document Classes

The basic syntax for different document classes is as follows.

Default Setting

By default, when using \documentclass{} , the document is formatted to be printed on letter-size paper with 10-point fonts . It is noted that 1 point ≈ 0.0138 inch ≈ 0.3515 mm.

Options for Document Classes

Various user-defined formats for a document can be achieved by specifying different options with \documentclass{} . This is done using the syntax \documentclass[x1, x2, …]{doctype} , where x1 , x2 , etc., within the square brackets [] represent the options. Multiple options can be included in any order, separated by commas . For example, \documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article} configures the document class to print an article on A4 paper with 12-point fonts.

Following is a table of standard options for the \documentclass[]{} command:

LaTeX document classes provide a powerful and flexible way to structure and format documents. By choosing the appropriate class and utilizing packages, you can create professional-looking documents for various purposes.

• How to write in LaTeX? Create first Document
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LaTeX document class for LSU theses and dissertations

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To produce LaTeX documents that are reasonably conformant to LSU Grad School requirements for theses and dissertations, our document class “lsuthesis” may be used in place of the standard “book” document class. The separate “lsutitle” package provides helper macros and produces the title page. That package is kept separate from the document class so that one can easily switch to other document classes.

Note: This is the 2022/03/11 version. This is a work-in-progress provided in this preliminary form to assist graduate students with an immediate need.

Document class

• lsuthesis.cls
• lsutitle.sty

To use the template below, you also need the two files above.

• mythesis.tex
• mythesis.pdf

Getting started

For an example of what can be produced, take a look at “mythesis.pdf”. To produce your own thesis or dissertation, download the other three files and modify “mythesis.tex”. More specifically:

• You need access to a TeX/LaTeX environment ;
• Place “mythesis.tex”, “lsuthesis.cls”, “lsutitle.sty” together in a folder;
• Use a text editor to modify “mythesis.tex”;
• Tell your your LaTeX environment to convert your modified “mythesis.tex” into a new “mythesis.pdf”;
• Repeat the last two steps as often as needed.

Debugging conformance issues

When debugging conformance issues, start by comparing your preamble to that of the original “mythesis.tex” from this page. Many conformance issues are not due to the “lsuthesis” document class but instead due to conflicts arising from unnecessary preamble content (particularly macro definitions and \usepackage{...} lines) that the student has copied from somewhere but doesn't actually need.

If you are a math graduate student using these files and receive reports from LSU Grad School over conformance issues that are specific to the document class (e.g., issues with margin sizes or with font sizes or with spacing), please contact Alexander Perlis. The math department also appreciates feedback from other departments and might be able to provide some assistance but ultimately is not responsible for helping students from other departments with the preparation of conformant documents.

• Printable View

Sample of a thesis written with yathesis class

The purpose of the class yathesis is to facilitate dissertations’ typesetting of theses prepared in France, whatever disciplines and institutes. It implements most notably recommendations from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research and this, transparently to the user. It has also been designed to (optionally) take advantage of powerful tools available in LaTeX, including packages:

• biblatex for the bibliography ;
• glossaries for the glossary, list of acronyms and symbols list.

The yathesis class, based on the book class, aims to be both simple to use and, to some extent, (easily) customizable.

The present template is more a sample than a template but can be used as a starting point to gradually fit your own needs. A real template can be found [here] .

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