Are you a PhD student at the University of Minho, preparing your thesis for submission? Are you writing your thesis with LaTeX? Then, this repository is for you.
You might have noticed that there are quite a few formatting and style rules that your thesis must follow, especially regarding the thesis cover. The University provides templates to create your thesis cover, but they are Adobe Illustrator Artwork (AI) files.
If you do not own Adobe Illustrator, you do not want to purchase it and/or you do not want to obtain an illegal copy of it, you do not have much of a choice but to roll your own attempt at creating the thesis cover from scratch. At least, I did. Now, this repository hosts the LaTeX files so that they may, hopefully, prevent you from wasting as much time as I did.
Simply compile the cover as its own PDF, and use \includepdf in your main thesis file.
The cover can be compiled with pdftex, xetex or luatex.
The University requires the use of the NewsGotT font, which is not available with pdftex, so I recommend luatex for the best results.
If you are compiling with xetex or luatex, first you need to download the required fonts: NewsGotT Regular and NewsGotT Bold.
Name the files newsgott-regular.ttf and newsgott-bold.ttf, respectively, and place them in the root of the repository (where cover.tex is).
If you can only compile with pdftex, for some reason, it uses a variant of the Helvetica font, which is not compliant with the University style, but is visually close enough.
This simply requires the installation of the helvet package.
Once the fonts are available, you should be able to compile the cover.
Editing the template to make your own cover is easy.
Open cover.tex and scroll down to a section that begins with the following marker.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% Variables - EDIT THESE
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%There, you will find a series of \gdef variable declarations, whose values you can edit.
They should be straightforward to understand.
For instance, your full name can be inserted in the variable that reads:
\gdef\@author{Your Full Name Goes Here}This template covers the association programmes of Minho-Aveiro-Porto as well.
Simply change the line that reads \gdef\mapi{0} to \gdef\mapi{1}.
Your cover will now include all the required University logos at the front.
The current version of the template does not support multiple Organic Units (e.g., a course that belongs both to the School of Engineering and the School of Sciences). It does not include the necessary logos. However, it should not be too hard to add, given the right tools.
If your thesis title is very long, it might not fit in the allocated space of the cover's spine. Try it out. If it spans more than two lines, you need to adjust the spine code.
Look for a section that reads % Cover Spine.
Within it, look for the following bit of code.
{\centering \fontsize{12}{14.4}\selectfont
\rotatebox[origin=c]{90}{\parbox[c][13mm]{90mm}{\raggedright \textbf{\printtitle}}}\par}You will want to increase those 90mm up to, for instance, 120mm.
André Santos is the author of the LaTeX code in this repository. All the included University logos are copyright of the respective Universities, namely the University of Minho, University of Aveiro and the University of Porto. These logos have been edited only to change the lettering colour, from their original colours to white, so that they comply with the PhD Thesis style rules set by the University of Minho.