[Tex/LaTex] PhD dissertation: templates vs scratch

best practicestemplates

I am still getting my feet wet with LaTeX (starting to read 'LaTeX for complete novices'). I have decided to use LaTeX for writing my dissertation. As I begin I was wondering if it would be better to start from scratch (and follow a book like 'Using LaTeX to write a dissertation') or to use a template.

And if a template is used, would it be better (and easy?) to go with a beautiful template like classicthesis and modify it for my university requirements, or use a template produced by an old PhD student from my university that I found off the Internet?

I am asking some of these because I thought maybe going from scratch might be easier for a novice since I can't understand all that code in a template, and by starting from scratch with a guide book might help me in learning instead of trying to debug a given template.

Thoughts?

EDIT: I feel like there is a number of folks who are saying that it is best to write my dissertation in LaTeX from scratch. the reasons make sense: customizability, learning LaTeX, debugging templates can be a mess, and going with something scratch can make a more streamlined and cleaner document. I think this is the way that I will go forward. This options seems less intimidating considering the problems of trying to figure out how to make complex template work. At this point I will research into KOMA vs Memoir.

Best Answer

Welcome! Just look at all the questions on this site from people who are struggling to adapt thesis templates to their needs and their university's requirements. I think that shows it is better to start from scratch if you have the time.

My recommendation is to use the memoir class and base your customized design on the model thesis demonstrated in the manual (texdoc memoir).

My other very strong recommendation is that you try to write very few LaTeX commands when you are writing in the early stages, and just focus on the words, not the formatting. Learn LaTeX using books, package documentation, and this site on the side for a while before trying to do anything heavy. Use mockups and MWEs to practice different types of layouts before implementing them with your own text. If you use the most neutral, default version of LaTeX markup early on, it will be easier to adapt later. And as a beginner I did not realize for a long time how much you could actually do with just the default setup.

Along the same lines, you can create semantic commands that will allow you to focus on content instead of style, but will also make it easier to customize down the road. For example, use \enquote from the csquotes package instead of hard-coding your ``quotes''. Commands inspired by TEI-XML tags like \ti or \booktitle, \foreign, \socalled can be then mapped however you want. For example, titles and foreign words are aliases for \emph and \socalled for "scare quotes" is really \enquote (so, \newcommand{\socalled}[1]{\enquote{#1}}).

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Teaching LaTeX and friends

This is written form my perspective and experience so you might feel this is subjective ... well it is. And of course i always address nature scientists.

First of all i want to say that here are many "best practice" Questions on tex.se, much to many to cite them all. Just go and search for "best practice".

For me with my little latex teaching experience it has turned out, that usual students who come with basic computer knowledge and hopefully with a little knowledge in programming or writing markup (html) do not have so many problems with "thinking" code, while all the others have. A basic latex course usually does not include the following topics and therfore they might be interesting as further topics:

Technical side:

unit handling (siunitx) structuring and markup
glossary handling (glossaries)
plots (pgfplots) and pictures (tikz)

Non technical side

typography
common rules for academic writing (such as DIN ans ISO)
dismissing obscure guidelines (given by non typographers) in a self confident way

Non LaTeX side:

how to choose the best editor
- texworks
- kile
- texshop
- txc
- texmaker (or one of the clones)
enhanced bibliography managment
- bibdesk (mac)
- jabref
- refworks
rcs
- hg
- git ....

I want to go a bit more in detail:

The editor

Well choosing the right editor is rather complex. What i saw while teaching complete beginners was that they easily become overstrained when using a more complex editor such as kile or texmaker. Secondary i believe that using the same editor for programming and for latex (eclipse e.g.) is not a good idea. The editor should provide code autocomplete (TAB + X), support synctex (you should tell your students how to use that) and minimal project management (e.g. by setting the main document).

Bib management

I really can´t understand people who do not use a automatic bibliography management system. But as TeXnican one should not even think of not using bibtex or biblatex. How to create a output of a bibtex-database should be part of a beginners course, creating the database itself with 3rd-party applications or by hand might be part of another course. I would say they needed to be introduced into a standalone tool such as jabref or bibdesk (mac). Depending on the environment your institution (university i guess) provides it could be useful to show them how to export e.g. from refworks to bibtex database.

Collaborative working

Well i think that LaTeX is somehow perfect for a distributed and collaborative work. I personally use hg , because it seems to be more handy than git. I also used the todonotes packages a lot to mark my document. But that might not be suitable for every situation. For email distribution it turned out to be useful to split the document into very very many small pieces so that almost everyone works with one or two separate document pieces only. This procedure requires a distinguished maintainer who puts all the pieces back into one.

Asking for help

Even old and wise people sometimes have problems with asking in the right way. So it definitely needs to be said, that even TeXperts do not have galadriels mirror, and guessing where a certain command comes form is very fatiguing. Not that this topic needs to be extended to the limit, ten minutes some when in the course should be enough to induce a awareness on this topic.

And of course the best of all "best practices" in the field of getting help is to use texdoc. Please please tell them about its magic!

--- to be continued ---

[Tex/LaTex] Working with templates

Snippet managers

A flexible and powerful way of working with templates is to use a snippet manager. In Replace the `$$ ... $$` macro with the `\[ ... \]` macros? - Prefer the way LaTeX lays it out, but `$` are faster to write you find a simple explanation of how a snippet manager works. What you do is simply to store each template as a separate snippet and use the power of the snippet manager to modify it on expansion.

YASnippet

Here is an example with YASnippet, a snippet manager for Emacs. The following steps are how to create a simple article template:

Enter the mode you want the snippets in. In this case I guess it is LaTeX-mode.
Do M-x yas/new-snippet.
Enter a name for the snippet.
You will now get a chance to edit the snippet. Mark everything by doing C-x h, then kill it by C-w.

You will now have an empty snippet. Paste the following into it and make sure the snippet ends after \end{document} and not on a new line:

# -*- mode: snippet -*-
# name: article
# key: arttemp
# --
\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[${1:english}]{babel}

\title{${2:Title}}
\author{${3:Author}}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

$0

\end{document}

Do C-c C-c to save and load the snippet.

Now you can use the snippet in LaTeX-mode by writing arttemp and then pressing Tab. Note how $1, $2, $3 and $0 defines tab stops and that the three first has default values which can be overridden. Here is an animation that shows how the snippet works:

Animation of the snippet above

Obviously the snippet in the example is a very simple snippet. One snippet I use as a template for articles is 172 lines long. It contains \usepackages for the packages I commonly use, package configuration and macro definitions for macros I commonly use. For more information on how to write snippets see the documentation.

With YASnippet your snippets are stored as files. The manual describes how you can organize snippets. I keep my snippets in ~/.emacs.d/mysnippets and load them by the following in my .emacs:

(setq yas/root-directory "~/.emacs.d/mysnippets"); Develop and keep personal snippets under ~/emacs.d/mysnippets
(yas/load-directory yas/root-directory); Load the snippets

By syncing ~/.emacs.d/mysnippets between computers I get the same snippets on all of them.