hello_thesis

Here I show how I used LaTeX for formatting my PhD thesis. It is meant for inspiration for others. I am not a LaTeX expert, so please don't ask me questions about how to do things in LaTeX. If you have improvements, then I am happy to receive pull requests.

Software used, apart from LaTeX:

CMake for generating project files to drive the generation of a PDF.
UseLATEX which contains a CMake function for defining a LaTeX PDF target. A copy is available in this repository.
ClassicThesis which is a style specifically made for theses. Your LaTeX distribution probably already provides it.
A build system for driving the generation of the PDF. See https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/manual/cmake-generators.7.html for a list of supported build systems.

To test things out, generate a PDF of the thesis like this:

git clone https://github.com/kordejong/hello_thesis.git

# Create a directory in which to store the PDF and all intermediate files
# created.
mkdir build
cd build

# Ask CMake to generate project files for the Ninja build too. Change Ninja
# to something else if you want to use another build tool.
cmake -G "Ninja" ../hello_thesis

# Tell Ninja to build the PDF
ninja

If all went well and you like the result, you can use the scripts and LaTeX sources as inspiration for your own thesis project.

I made various changes to the default ClassicThesis configuration. Just compare the one in the repository with the default one from the ClassicThesis zip file.

Use biber instead of bibtex.
I prefer the lines to be a little bit wider.
I prefer to have black fonts, also for headers and links.
...