Preparing a thesis in LaTeX

This document describes the use of a LaTeX document class guthesis, written to help produce a thesis conforming to the regulations of the Faculty (see sections 7 and 8 in particular) with regard to line spacing, margin widths and title page etc. This document class is available on the lab PCs (including those in offices). If you want to use it elsewhere you will need to take a copy of the file guthesis.cls and place it the same folder as your thesis document.

Here is a suggested layout for a LaTeX document which will produce the thesis. This sample thesis consists of an abstract (mandatory), acknowledgements, four chapters, two appendices and a bibliography. The document of consists of a main file (testthesis.tex) which is processed with the contents of the chapters etc. and the bibliography in separate files (ch1.tex etc., thesis.bib), all stored in the same directory. Copies of all the relevent files are stored on the Novell server, from lab PCs they are in the directory P:\localtexmf\docs\guthesis\. They are also available here.

This is annotated version of testthesis.tex.

\documentclass{guthesis}   Declares document class as guthesis. This is suitable for a PhD thesis; use \documentclass[msc]{guthesis}, for an MSc thesis.
\usepackage{amsmath,amsfonts,cite}   cite gives citations a more compact format. Include any other packages you want. amsmath is particularly useful.
       
\title{Darboux transformations etc.}


These 4 lines set the things which appear on the title page.
\author{Jonathan J C Nimmo}
\submissionmonth{April}
\submissionyear{2002}
       
\includeonly{










Use this to selectively include only those parts you are curently working on.

Place a % at the beginning of any line containing a filename to omit the file from the list to be processed.

 abstract,
 acknowledge,
 ch1,
 ch2,
 ch3,
 ch4,
 appa,
 appb,
 null
}
       
\begin{document}      
\maketitle   This produces the title page with the correct layout
\include{abstract}      
\include{acknowledge}      
\tableofcontents   Automatically produces the table of contents. As always, you may need to process testthesis several times to have an accurate table of contents.
\include{ch1}      
\include{ch2}      
\include{ch3}      
\include{ch4}      
\appendix   This command alters the meaning of \chapter. From this point on, "chapters" are appendices.
\include{appa}      
\include{appb}      
       
\bibliographystyle{plain}   Use of BibTeX is recommended. The software bibdb is available on lab PCs and has help on using BibTeX.
\bibliography{thesis}  
\end{document}      

Page created: 20/8/2002

Last edited: 20/8/2002 by JJCN