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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.

book document class in LaTeX

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.

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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!

letter document class in LaTeX

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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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.

maketitle

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.

abstract

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.

Share this:

16 comments.

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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.

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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)

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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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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.

Preparing Your Ph.D. Dissertation Using LaTeX

Introduction, preparing the latex file, downloading the macros to your computer, steps for final submission.

Last updated 11 February 2012

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Formatting Information

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Formatting Information — An introduction to typesetting with LATEX

Chapter 2: Basic structures

Section 2.1: the document class declaration, how to tell l a t e x what type of document you want, in this section….

  • Document classes
  • Extending the default classes
  • Document class options

In order to set things up correctly, L A T E X needs to know up front what type of document you are going to be writing. There are probably lots of different types of document you deal with: in L A T E X they are called classes of documents — ‘class’ is just a computing science word for ‘type’.

2.1.1 Document classes

To tell L A T E X what class of document you are going to create, the first line of your file MUST identify it. To start a report, for example, you would type a \documentclass command like this as the first line of your document:

There are four built-in classes provided, and many others that you can download (some may already be installed for you):

for business, technical, legal, academic, or scientific reports; and for theses and dissertations;

for white papers, magazine or journal articles, reviews, conference papers, essays, or research notes;

for books, booklets, or whole journals;

for letters.

These default classes are fairly basic in terms of layout and design, in order to make them easier to customise by adding packages , which are the style and layout plug-ins that L A T E X uses to let you automate formatting and change the design of your documents. Packages and classes are explained in more detail in Chapter 3 ‘Plugins and support’ with reference to --> below.

The article class in particular can be used for almost any short piece of typesetting by simply omitting the titling, changing the layout, and adding the relevant packages — like we saw in the Quick Start document in § 1.4 with reference to --> above.

The letter class is not much used: it provides a very old-fashioned layout. There are other more up-to-date classes for letters available for download.

2.1.2 Extending the default classes

The built-in classes are intended as starting-points, especially for drafts, and for compatibility when exchanging documents with other L A T E X users. They come built into every installation of L A T E X and if left unmodified, are guaranteed to format identically everywhere. They are not intended as final-format publication-quality layouts, and should not be used as such. For most other purposes, especially for publication, you use L A T E X packages to extend these classes to do what you need. Some common ways to do this are:

The memoir package and the komascript bundle contain more sophisticated replacements for all the built-in classes, as well as additional ones;

Many academic and scientific publishers provide their own special class files for articles and books (some come with L A T E X , others are on the publishers’ web sites for download);

Conference organisers may also provide class files for authors to write papers for submission, presentation, preprints, and proceedings;

Many universities provide their own thesis document classes in order to ensure exact fulfilment of their formatting requirements (many of these are on CTAN );

Businesses and other organisations can provide their users with private corporate classes on a central server and configure L A T E X installations to look there first for packages, fonts, etc (not usually available to the public, of course);

There are nearly 300 document classes on CTAN (see http://www.ctan.org/topic/class )

The four default built-in document classes are therefore adequate for drafts or for sending to a colleague to edit, but they are not really usable for final-format publishing. For this you need to use packages to design it yourself, or (better) use a class file designed by your publisher or institution (or yourself!) to fit the type of publication. Quite often these are based on the default classes for compatibility, but typeset quite different output.

2.1.3 Document class options

The default layouts were originally designed to fit as drafts on US ‘Letter’ size paper. To create documents with similar margins for A4 paper, you need to specify the paper size in an optional argument in square brackets before the document class name, eg

Many T E X systems now install the a4paper option as the default, so this may not be needed; on the contrary, North American users may now need to specify the letterpaper option instead. The geometry package, which we will see later, lets you specify other bigger and smaller paper sizes.

Books and journals are not usually printed on office-size paper. Although for draft purposes L A T E X ’s layouts fit on the standard A4 or Letter stationery in your printer, it makes them look odd: the margins are too wide and the font size is too small, because the finished job will normally be trimmed to a completely different size entirely — try printing a few pages of the PDF version of this chapter and then trimming the margins to make it 188 mm × 235 mm (the same as the Companion series) and you’ll be amazed at how it changes the appearance.

The other default settings in the built-in classes are for:

10pt type (all document classes)

two-sided printing (books and reports) or one-sided (articles and letters)

separate title page (books and reports only)

These can be modified with the following document class options which you can add in the same set of square brackets, separated by commas (the 10pt option is the default):

to specify 11pt type (headings, footnotes, etc get scaled up or down in proportion);

to specify 12pt type (again, headings etc get scaled to match);

to format one-sided printing for books and reports;

to format articles or letters for two-sided printing;

to force articles to have a separate title page (books and reports get that automatically);

makes L A T E X highlight any hyphenation or justification problems with a small square in the right-hand margin so they can be located quickly by you or a proofreader. This option also sets graphics to print as an empty rectangle containing just the filename of the image, so that image-heavy drafts will print more quickly and use less ink or toner.

So, if you were using L A T E X for a report to be in 12pt type on Letter paper, but printed one-sided in draft mode, you would use:

The 10pt, 11pt, and 12pt settings cover between them probably 99.9% of all common text-document typesetting. There are extra options for other body type sizes in the extsizes bundle of document classes ( extarticle , extbook , extreport , etc), and various national and international organisations supporting the visually-impaired have special large-type document class options.

Exercise 2.1 — Create a new document

Use your editor to create a new, empty document

If your editor insists on filling your new document with template material, delete it all so that the file is empty

Type in a Document Class Declaration as shown above

Add a font size option if you wish

In North America, omit the a4paper option or change it to letterpaper

Save the file ( make up a name ) ensuring the name ends with .tex

Global options

In addition to any options specific to the document class, it is also possible to put package options in the \documentclass options argument instead of in the \usepackage command (see § 3.1.2 with reference to --> below), provided they are not implemented by more than one package. Packages which do not implement the named option at all are supposed to silently ignore it.

Picking suitable filenames

Never, never , NEVER create directories (folders) or file names which contain spaces or non-printing, non- ASCII characters. Although your operating system may support them, some don’t, and they will only cause grief and tears, especially in automation software like document builders, web scripts, and app-based remote compilers.

Make filenames as short or as long as you wish, but strictly avoid spaces. Stick to upper- and lower-case letters without accents (A–Z and a–z), the digits 0–9, the hyphen ( - ), the underscore ( _ ), and the dot (full point or period:  . ) — similar to the conventions for a Web URI : it will let you refer to T E X files over the Web more easily, make your files more portable, and make it easier to use standard system utilities and applications, as well as those distributed with T E X

Readers familiar with SGML , HTML , and XML will recognise the concept as similar to the Document Type Declaration (it’s still called a ‘type’ there, not a ‘class’). 

Theses and dissertations require an Abstract, which is provided in the report class but not in the book class. Many universities provide a special thesis class of their own. 

The built-in letter class is rather idiosyncratic: there are much better ones you can use which you will find in the memoir package and the komascript bundle. 

‘Letter’ size is 8½″×11″, which is the trimmed size of the long-obsolete Demy Quarto, still in use in North America. Other common US office sizes are ‘Legal’, which is 8½″×14″, a ‘bastard’ (variant) cutting close to the old Foolscap (8¼″×13¼″); Ledger or Tabloid (11″×17″, which is exactly twice ‘Letter’, in the same way that A3 is twice A4); and ‘Executive’ (7″×10″). International Organization for Standardization ( ISO ) standard ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ paper sizes, used everywhere else, are still largely unknown in many parts of North America. 

Note that the standard built-in document classes (book, article, report, or letter) only use the paper size to adjust the margins: they do not embed the paper size name in the PostScript or PDF output. For this you need the geometry package in order to ensure that the paper size name gets embedded correctly in the output, otherwise printers may select the wrong paper tray, or reject the job. 

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Overleaf - LaTeX: Books and Dissertations

  • Getting Started
  • Creating a LaTeX Document in Overleaf
  • Structuring and Formatting
  • Lists, Tables, Images, and Labelling
  • Mathematics in LaTeX
  • Bibliographies and Citing
  • Books and Dissertations
  • Submitting from Overleaf

Getting started

To write a book or dissertation in LaTeX, it is recommended that you change your document class to book . By using the article class book , you can add chapters to your document.

Another document class that may be useful in writing longer documents with chapters is the report  class.

Adding chapters and table of contents

The ideal way to add chapters to your LaTeX document while writing a book is by creating a separate file for each chapter. These individual chapter files do not need a preamble. All you need to add at the beginning of each chapter file is the name of the chapter using the \chapter {..} command.

Using the \input {..} command in your root document (titled main.tex by default), you can add in your chapters.

You can further add a table of contents to your document using the \tableofcontents command. This command automatically uses the information entered for each chapter to generate a table of contents for your document. 

Other useful sections to add to your book or dissertation could be a list of tables or figures.

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Template for a Masters or Doctoral Thesis

This LaTeX template is used by many universities as the basis for thesis and dissertation submissions, and is a great way to get started if you haven't been provided with a specific version from your department.

This version of the template is provided by Vel at LaTeXTemplates.com , and is already loaded in Overleaf so you can start writing immediately.

Checkout this short video to see how to easily create and edit new chapters as your thesis develops.

Please read the unofficial quick guide to the template; it contains some tips and suggestions on how to modify certain things.

(Updated 27/08/17)

Template for a Masters or Doctoral Thesis

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IMAGES

  1. Your Guide to documentclass LaTeX: Types and options

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  2. Week 4 Latex Tutorial Lecture 002 Document Class Options

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  3. Latex document class report

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  4. Make a Document in LaTeX

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  5. LaTeX Templates

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  6. LaTeX-AMC-PhD-Thesis-Template/README.md at master · SeaShadow/LaTeX-AMC

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VIDEO

  1. Document Preparation using LaTeX

  2. Report,dissertation ,Thesis in LaTeX

  3. Formatting Research paper easily using Latex (overleaf)

  4. Paths and Decorations in LaTeX tikz

  5. Adding images to LaTeX in 5 easy steps!

  6. Latex 4: All about font color, highlight text, and style in LaTeX

COMMENTS

  1. How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 1): Basic Structure

    The preamble. In this example, the main.tex file is the root document and is the .tex file that will draw the whole document together. The first thing we need to choose is a document class. The article class isn't designed for writing long documents (such as a thesis) so we'll choose the report class, but we could also choose the book class.. We can also change the font size by adding square ...

  2. Class for my thesis (I am a beginner, just installed LaTeX)… which

    When your thesis will be finished, you could use beamer documentclass to create the presentation for its defense. For any problem, we are here to help. If you have no time to learn and you are full of doubt, just use Word (even if LaTeX is MUCH better). \begin{wackynote}

  3. What are the available "documentclass" types and their uses?

    The standalone class actually simply loads a real class but uses the preview package to reduce the page size to the content. It is supposed to be used for subfiles holding only picture or similar code which are then included into a main document. The standalone class and package allow this files to be compiled standalone or as part of the main document without adjusting the file.

  4. Your Guide to documentclass LaTeX: Types and options

    Table 1: LaTeX document types 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.

  5. Writing a thesis in LaTeX

    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: 1. \documentclass[options]{report} See here for a complete list of options.

  6. PDF LATEX Thesis Class for University of Colorado

    The overall structure of a thesis main *.tex file, using the thesis class, should be like this: \documentclass[ options ]{thesis} prologue commands \begin{document} main text in chapters, then bibliography, then appendix \end{document} Thesis Class is a variation of the basic report class of LaTeX 2ε, so it takes many of the same options. The ...

  7. PDF How to Write a Doctoral Dissertation with LATEX

    How to use the nuthesis document class The nuthesis class is a slightly modi ed amsbook class. 3.1. Preamble The preamble of your document should start like this: \documentclass[12pt]{nuthesis} The rst line declares \nuthesis" as document class, with and option of 12pt for the character size, which is slightly greater that usual (the default is ...

  8. How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX

    Here we provide a guide to getting started on writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard template which is pre-loaded into Overleaf. We have a large number of thesis templates in our online library, and you can upload your own if your university provides a set of LaTeX template files. We'll assume you've used LaTeX before and so are ...

  9. LaTeX templates for writing a thesis

    The thesis template site mostly just links to available external sites with templates. It provides links to ready-to-go thesis templates of various universities worldwide. There's even a google map for viewing the templates origins on the world map. Besides LaTeX templates there are also LyX thesis templates.

  10. Guide to Writing Your Thesis in LaTeX

    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: \documentclass{urithesis} This tells LaTeX to use the urithesis document class with all default ...

  11. Preparing Your Ph.D. Dissertation Using LaTeX

    Preparing the LaTeX File. To prepare the LaTeX file, copy the files from the sample thesis located at /~vojta/thesis/ , and adapt them to your situation. The document class ucbthesis is already installed on our computer network. However, if you are using a thin client, then you will need to type the following command, just once, in each ...

  12. Section 2.1: The Document Class Declaration

    2.1.1 Document classes. To tell L A T E X what class of document you are going to create, the first line of your file MUST identify it. To start a report, for example, you would type a \documentclass command like this as the first line of your document: \documentclass{report} There are four built-in classes provided, and many others that you can download (some may already be installed for you):

  13. How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 2): Page Layout

    In the first line we've entered a blank \fancyhead command which clears all the header fields. In the second line we've told LaTeX that we want the text "Thesis title" on the right-hand side of the header for the odd pages and the left for even pages. The third line clears the footer fields using a blank \fancyfoot command.

  14. LibGuides: Overleaf

    To write a book or dissertation in LaTeX, it is recommended that you change your document class to book. By using the article class book, you can add chapters to your document. \documentclass { book } Another document class that may be useful in writing longer documents with chapters is the report class.

  15. PDF Standard Document Classes for LaTeX version 2e

    The LATEX format only defines a number of tools with which floating objects can be defined. This is done in the document class. It needs to define the following macros for each floating object of type TYPE (e.g., TYPE = figure). \fps@TYPE The default placement specifier for floats of type TYPE.

  16. PDF A LATEX Document Class for Dissertations and Theses at The University

    UThesis is a LATEX document class that facilitates a uniform format for dissertations and theses at the University of Toledo. It transforms a draft document into one that is guaranteed to satisfy all style and formatting requirements established by the Graduate Faculty. UThesis was created so UT graduate students could minimize time spent worry-

  17. PHD/Master/Bachelor Thesis: Which Document Class to Choose

    As I already mentioned in my previous question, I intend to give a LaTeX introduction to phd students. Most of them will already be using LaTeX somehow but their knowledge will be random. I want to give them a systematic approach. In addition I want to show them the best practice for common problems/tasks. The (German) slides I use were created ...

  18. How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 5): Customising Your ...

    In the previous post we looked at adding a bibliography to our thesis using the biblatex package.In this, the final post of the series, we're going to look at customising some of the opening pages. In the first video we made a rather makeshift title page using the \maketitle command and by using an \includegraphics command in the \title command. Although this works, it doesn't give us as much ...

  19. thesis

    Feb 23, 2021 at 11:49. 2. Both report and book should be fine (As a European, I actually favor scrreprt and scrbook, respectively, but that's a personal choice.) Some people swear by the memoir class. From your selection, article is probably least suited. - Ingmar. Feb 23, 2021 at 11:52.

  20. Template for a Masters or Doctoral Thesis

    Abstract. This LaTeX template is used by many universities as the basis for thesis and dissertation submissions, and is a great way to get started if you haven't been provided with a specific version from your department. This version of the template is provided by Vel at LaTeXTemplates.com, and is already loaded in Overleaf so you can start ...

  21. LaTeX document class for LSU theses and dissertations

    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 ...

  22. What are your favorite document classes and what ...

    The "do-it-all" classes like Koma-script and memoir are great when you actually need all those features, but I'm more of a Unix-philosophy person myself: a piece of software should do one thing and do it well. A document class should only be a document class, A package for doing X should only be a package for doing X. That way, things are modular.

  23. document classes

    23. The first question you need to answer before you embark on such an endeavour is the raison d'être for writing a new class. In many cases a small package might be a better idea. I would start from using and understanding an existing class such as classicthesis, make a list of the changes that you want and then fork it into something new.