PhD thesis in LaTeX - PDF

This repository contains the source files of my PhD thesis, Data augmentation and image understanding, written in LaTeX. I'm sharing it with a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License, so feel free to clone the repository and use it as a template for your own thesis or any other document. You are also welcome to get in touch if you have any questions!

How to use this package

Overview of the structure

This LaTex document is built in a modular way. That means that different parts of the document are contained in separate files and organised in a high-level structure. This has a number of advantages, especially for large documents: it is possible to easily compile only some parts of the document, keep track of changes and in general have a more organised structure.

This project has the following structure concept:

.
├── includes
│   ├── prologue
│   │   └── prologue.tex
│   ├── chapter1
│   │   ├── chapter1.tex
│   │   └── img
│   │       └── img1-chapter1.png
│   │       └── img2-chapter1.png
│   ├── chapter2
│   │   ├── chapter2.tex
│   │   └── img
│   │       └── img1-chapter2.png
│   │       └── img2-chapter2.png
│   └── epilogue
│       └── epilogue.tex
├── main.tex
├── structure.sty
├── references.bib
└── bibliography.bst

main.tex is the main .tex file of the project: it is the file that is compiled and that defines the overall structure of the document. It incorporates the rest of the files through \input{} and \include{} commands.
structure.sty defines the style of the document, for example through \usepackage{} commands.
references.bib contains the list of BiBTeX entries.
bibliography.bst defines the style of the bibliography section.

An example of main.tex could be the following:

\documentclass[a4paper]{book}

\usepackage{structure}

\begin{document}

\input{includes/prologue/prologue}
\include{includes/chapter1/chapter1}
\include{includes/chapter2/chapter2}
\input{includes/epilogue/epilogue}

\end{document}

Two versions of the document: print and digital

One of the great advantages of creating a document with LaTeX is that it allows us to easily define multiple style versions, while keeping the content separate.

For this project, I defined two versions:

Print: for the hard-copy version of the thesis. It essentially uses a book style, defining different styles for left and right pages, setting blank pages, it uses higher-resolution versions of the images, etc.
Digital: for the PDF version of the thesis. It does not differentiate the style of odd and even pages, does not introduce blank pages, uses lower-resolution images, etc.

In order to define these two documents, there are essentially three things to take into account in this project:

Separate style files: structure-print.sty and structure-digital.sty
Separate main files: main-print.tex and main-digital.tex
Separate image directories: ./includes/<subfolder>/img/ and ./includes/<subfolder>/img-hd/. Note that img-hd directories are not pushed to GitHub (see below)

How to compile

First, you will need a working LaTeX installation in order to compile the project and create a PDF. Let's face it, installing LaTeX can be painful experience. I attempted to mitigate this pain for others (and my future self) with a brief guide on how to get LaTeX working on Linux. Depending on your installation, you may have to install some additional packages and fonts (for example upl Palatino). You may take a look at structure-print.sty and structure-digital.sty to see the packages used or simply install them as the compiler complains.

Alternatively, you may use an online LaTeX editors, such as Overleaf.

Second, you can clone this repository into your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/alexhernandezgarcia/phd-thesis-latex.git

At this point, if all the LaTeX packages are installed, it should be possible to compile main-digital.tex without errors. If you generate a PDF, it should look like this one.

In order to compile main-print.tex, you have to take an additional step because it will try to use images stored in ./includes/<subfolder>/img-hd/, but this directories are not uploaded to GitHub in order to spare storage space. You can simply create dummy img-hd directories by copying the ./includes/<subfolder>/img/ directories, with the following in the command line:o

for dir in $(ls -d includes/*/img/); do cp -r $dir $(echo $dir | sed -e "s/img/img-hd/g"); done

After this, it should be possible to also compile main-print.tex (though with standard resolution images, of course).

Please get in touch if you want some help!

Citation

If you want to cite this thesis in a scientific document, you may use the following:

Alex Hernandez-Garcia, 2020. Data augmentation and image understanding. PhD thesis, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück

@phdthesis{hergar2020phdthesis,
	author = {Hernandez-Garcia, Alex},
	title = {Data augmentation and image understanding},
	school = {Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabr{\"u}ck},
	year = {2020},
}

License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License