latex thesis font

• 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.

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PhD thesis formatting

There is no official pre-made departmental or University-wide style template for PhD theses. Some argue that learning (and advancing!) the art of beautifully typesetting a thesis is a crucial part of getting a PhD.

Here are some practical recommendations, examples, and useful starting points.

Most PhD authors in the Computer Laboratory prefer LaTeX as their typesetting system (under both Linux or Windows), mainly because of its

• excellent and yet unmatched support for mathematical formulae;
• good support for managing bibliographic references;
• good support for high-quality typography;
• easy integration with software-engineering tools (make, revision control, etc.);
• very safe and robust handling of large documents;
• long-term stability;
• comprehensive free tool support.

A common approach is to use the report style, with a suitable title page added, margins changed to make good use of the A4 format, and various other changes to suit submission requirements and individual tastes (e.g., other fonts).

For preparing publication-quality diagrams, some of the most powerful and popular tools used include:

• PGF/TikZ – the probably most sophisticated drawing package for LaTeX
• matplotlib – Matlab-style function plotting in Python

Official requirements

There used to be detailed Student Registry PhD format requirements , regarding font sizes and line spacing, but most Degree Committees have dropped these, recognizing that they were mainly motivated by past typewriter conventions. The rules left are now mainly about the word count .

In particular, it is no longer necessary for dissertations to be printed single sided or in “one-and-a-half spaced type”. If you still like to increase the line spacing, for easier proofreading, you can achieve this in LaTeX by placing into the preamble the line “ \usepackage{setspace}\onehalfspacing ”.

Recommendations

One Cambridge thesis-binding company, J.S. Wilson & Son , recommend on their web page to leave 30 mm margin on the spine and 20 mm on the other three sides of the A4 pages sent to them. About a centimetre of the left margin is lost when the binder stitches the pages together.

Write your thesis title and section headings in “sentence case”, that is use the same capitalization that you would have used in normal sentences (capitalize only the first word, proper nouns and abbreviations). Avoid the US-style “title case” that some conference-proceedings publishers require.

• Sentence case is normal typographic practice in the UK (see any UK-published newspaper, magazine, journals such as Nature , etc.).
• The catalogues of both the University Library thesis collection and our departmental Technical Report series record titles this way, and you don't want the cataloguers mess with your title capitalization when your thesis finally reaches them.
• It preserves useful information about the correct capitalization of any names or technical terms used.

Page numbers

Use a single page-number sequence for all pages in your thesis, i.e. do not use a separate sequence of Roman numerals for front-matter (title page, abstract, acknowledgements, table of contents, table of figure). In LaTeX that means using the report style, not the book style.

• PDF viewers number pages continuously starting from 1, and using anything else as printed page numbers causes confusion.
• This will save you some reformatting when submitting your thesis as a techreport .

Bibliographic references

If you use purely-numeric bibliographic references, do not forget to still mention authors’ surnames, as a courtesy to both the authors and your readers. Also, try to add the exact page number on which the quoted point is found in the reference; LaTeX supports this really well. (“suggested by Crowcroft and Kuhn [42,p107]”)

Technical Report submission

After a thesis has been approved by the examiners, the author normally submits it for publication as a Computer Laboratory Technical Report .

It is a good idea to read early on the submission guidelines for technical reports , as this may reduce the need to change the formatting later.

If you want to minimize any changes needed between your submitted thesis and the corresponding technical report version, then – in addition to applying all the above advice – you can

• make page 1 the title page,
• make page 2 the required declaration of originality,
• make page 3 the summary, and
• choose a layout suitable for double-sided printing (required for techreport, since 2010 also allowed for final PhD submission).

This way, there is a very high chance that turning your thesis into a techreport could be as simple as replacing pages 1 and 2 with the standard Technical Report title page (which the techreport editor can do for you).

More information

• The Computer Laboratory house style page explains where to find the University identifier that many put on the title page of their thesis.
• Markus Kuhn’s simple PhD thesis template ( snapshot ) is just one possible starting point.
• The cam-thesis LaTeX class is a collaborative effort to maintain a Cambridge PhD thesis template for Computer Laboratory research students, initiated by Jean Martina, Rok Strniša, and Matej Urbas.
• Effective scientific electronic publishing – Markus Kuhn’s notes on putting scientific publications onto the web, especially for LaTeX/LNCS users.
• International Standard ISO 7144 Presentation of theses and similar documents (1986) contains also some general guidelines for formatting dissertations that may be of use.
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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.

Frequently Asked Question List for TeX

Formatting a thesis in LaTeX

Thesis styles are usually very specific to your university, so it’s usually not profitable to ask around for a package outside your own university. Since many universities (in their eccentric way) still require double-spaced thesis text, you may also need separately to set up double spacing .

If you want to write a new thesis class of your own, a good place to start is the University of California style, but remember that it’s often difficult to produce a thesis that both looks good and conforms with the style that your university demands.

FAQ ID: Q-thesis Tags:  classes

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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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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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 4:33 pm

Post by Johannes_B » Sun Feb 26, 2017 7:12 pm

Post by aswadson » Mon Feb 27, 2017 1:51 pm

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

Post by Johannes_B » Tue Feb 28, 2017 7:18 am

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KU Thesis and Dissertation Formatting: LaTeX/BibTeX Support

• Formatting Specifics
• Title and Acceptance Pages
• Fonts and Spacing
• Page Numbering
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• Rotating Charts or Tables
• Working with Footnotes
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• Thesis/Dissertation Filenames

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LaTeX/BibTeX Templates

Under "Support for Formatting Theses and Dissertations", there are some handy LaTeX thesis and dissertation templates:

• https://graduate.ku.edu/etd-formatting-and-working-multimedia-files

LaTeX/ BibTeX Libguide

Do you have a general question about how to use LaTeX? Here is a link to the KU libguide:

• https://guides.lib.ku.edu/LaTeX/BibTeX
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ClassicThesis – A “classically styled” thesis package

This package provides an elegant layout designed in homage to Bringhurst’s “The Elements of Typographic Style”. It makes use of a range of techniques to get the best results achievable using T e X .

Included in the bundle are templates to make thesis writing easier.

Download the contents of this package in one zip archive (643.5k).

Community Comments

• 2015-09-07 CTAN update: classicthesis
• 2011-06-06 CTAN Update: classicthesis
• 2007-11-04 CTAN package update: classicthesis

Suggestions

Maybe you are interested in the following packages as well.

• arsclassica: A different view of the ClassicThesis package
• muthesis: Classes for University of Manchester Dept of Computer Science
• utorontothesis: A thesis class definition for University of Toronto
• uwthesis: University of Washington thesis class

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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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• Font sizes, families, and styles
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Font sizes
• 3 Font families
• 4 Font styles
• 5 Putting it all together
• 6 Reference guide
• 7 Further reading

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
• Bold, italics and underlining
• Text alignment
• Multiple columns
• Paragraph formatting
• Line breaks and blank spaces
• International language support
• The not so short introduction to L a T e X 2 ε
• Documentation Home
• Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes

Overleaf guides

• Creating a document in Overleaf
• Uploading a project
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• Using the Overleaf project menu
• Including images in Overleaf
• Exporting your work from Overleaf
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• Using bibliographies in Overleaf
• Sharing your work with others
• Using the History feature
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LaTeX Basics

• Creating your first LaTeX document
• Choosing a LaTeX Compiler
• Paragraphs and new lines

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• Mathematical expressions
• Subscripts and superscripts
• Brackets and Parentheses
• Fractions and Binomials
• Aligning equations
• Spacing in math mode
• Integrals, sums and limits
• Display style in math mode
• List of Greek letters and math symbols
• Mathematical fonts
• Using the Symbol Palette in Overleaf

Figures and tables

• Inserting Images
• Positioning Images and Tables
• Lists of Tables and Figures
• Drawing Diagrams Directly in LaTeX
• TikZ package

References and Citations

• Bibliography management with bibtex
• Bibliography management with natbib
• Bibliography management with biblatex
• Bibtex bibliography styles
• Natbib bibliography styles
• Natbib citation styles
• Biblatex bibliography styles
• Biblatex citation styles
• Multilingual typesetting on Overleaf using polyglossia and fontspec
• Multilingual typesetting on Overleaf using babel and fontspec
• Quotations and quotation marks

Document structure

• Sections and chapters
• Table of contents
• Cross referencing sections, equations and floats
• Nomenclatures
• Management in a large project
• Multi-file LaTeX projects
• Lengths in L a T e X
• Headers and footers
• Page numbering
• Page size and margins
• Single sided and double sided documents
• Code listing
• Code Highlighting with minted
• Using colours in LaTeX
• Margin notes
• Supporting modern fonts with X Ǝ L a T e X

Presentations

• Environments

Field specific

• Theorems and proofs
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• Feynman diagrams
• Molecular orbital diagrams
• Chess notation
• Knitting patterns
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• Typesetting exams in LaTeX
• Attribute Value Matrices

Class files

• Understanding packages and class files
• List of packages and class files
• Writing your own package
• Writing your own class

Advanced TeX/LaTeX

• In-depth technical articles on TeX/LaTeX

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