The University of Southampton has a number of requirements for the typesetting of theses for the completion of doctoral research degrees, as well as for the MPhil degree. These requirements are outlined in the document Guidance for Completion of Research Degrees (GCRD). The University provides an official Microsoft Word template, and the Faculty of Physical Sciences & Engineering has developed a similar LaTeX template, however it is not clear whether said template has been updated recently.
This repository provides both a LaTeX class, sotonthesis.cls, which conforms to requirements of the GCRD (as of May 2016), but also a structured project to aid in help make the process of writing a thesis more organised. The class can also be used as an Annual Progress Report template by passing the optional argument nothesisline to the class:
\documentclass[nothesisline]{sotonthesis}which will remove lines from the template that reference that the document is a thesis for a degree.
Also provided is a latexmkrc file to automate the compiling of the thesis sufficient numbers of times to correct citations and references using the program latexmk. This program is usally provided as part of a standard LaTeX distribution and can also be installed independently. For example to install it on a Ubuntu system enter the following into the terminal:
sudo apt-get install latexmkOnce latexmk is installed, the thesis can be compiled simply by running latexmk in this directory:
latexmkThe output from the command will inform you of any missing references, figures, or compilation errors.
The template directory is structured in the following way:
auto/- This directory is automatically generated by the Emacs package AUCTeX, the use of which is optional.build/- This directory contains all compilation output, including the final PDF document.frontmatter/- This directory contains files relevant to the frontmatter of the thesis, such as the abstract, authorship declaration, and acknowledgements.frontmatter/abstract.tex- The default location for the abstract.frontmatter/acknowledgements.tex- The default location for the acknowledgements.frontmatter/authorship-declaration.tex- The authorship declaration requires you to state whether any part of your thesis appears in published works. In this file you only need to list such publications, the authorship declaration will be generated for you automatically.
img/- The default location for any images you may wish to includerefs/- The default location for storing and BibTex.bibfiles.sections/- The default location for the individual chapters and appendicies.tikz/- A working directory used when generating any TikZ images used in your thesis.
Also included is the JHEP bibliography style used as standard in hep-th publications. You may replace this with your own bibliography style.
The file thesis.tex is a basic template to get you started with using the sotonthesis class. There are seven areas in the template that require your attention and they are marked by large comment blocks, such as
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%% Extra packages
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% If you need any extra LaTeX packages in your thesis, list them here.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%There seven areas are:
- Extra packages
- Basic information
- Abstract*
- Authorship declaration*
- Acknowledgements*
- Thesis chapters
- Bibliography style and sources
The Abstract, Authorship declaration and Acknowledgement sections only require modification if you do not wish to use the standard layout provided by this template.
In the Thesis chapters section you should use the LaTeX \input command to include you thesis chapters. The command \appsection{} can be used to mark subsequent sections as appendicies to the current chapter until a new chapter is started.
If you want to determine how many words, figures, equations, etc. you have used you can use the program texcount:
texcount -inc thesis.texThis template is published under the Unlicese.