/pittetd

Updates to the University of Pittsburgh ETD Template

Primary LanguageTeX

pittetd

This is an updated (read: unofficial, simplified) version of the University of Pittsburgh's Electronic Theses and Dissertations intended for use under current ETD specifications.

As of writing, both Overleaf and CTAN host wildly outdated (i.e. 20 years old) versions of the ETD document. A scan through the provided .dtx and .cls files, alongside a comparison of the files provided through the ETD website, reveals:

  • Essentially no meaningful changes in 20 years
  • No updates to the actual template source file (pittetd.dtx is used to generate pittetd.cls, yet only the pittetd.cls file was ever changed)
  • Much of the template relies on outdated LaTeX, build systems, and gives unhelpful instructions in the documentation (pittetd.pdf).
  • Even the template files supplied by ETD's website does not comply with the specifications ETD themselves lay out.

This repo offers a version of the pittetd LaTeX class which attempts to fix the above issues (in particular, the last bullet point), while trimming down on compatibility patches for packages (the *.pit files, again, generated by pittetd.dtx)

Usage

If you don't plan on making changes to the template, simply download a copy of pittetd.cls and an-etd.tex (a demonstration LaTex document using the pittetd class) and write your dissertation or thesis in an-etd.tex. There's nothing special about its name, so you can also rename it if you'd like.

Porting to an existing .tex

It might be possible to port your existing thesis/dissertation to use this class file by simply overwriting pittetd.cls, but there are substantial changes to how the class file actually gets used. Therefore, I strongly recommend copying your text, figures, graphs, etc. and any other customization (in that order!) into an-etd.tex.

Contributing

I'm not realistically going to maintain this, but pretending for a second that I will...

If you want to contribute fixes and/or overhaul the package documentation, make sure you:

  1. Edit pittetd.dtx and use it to generate the documentation PDF, patch files, and class file (pittetd.cls). Do not edit pittetd.cls or .pit files directly.
  2. Demonstrate your changes' needs or effects by adding a working example to an-etd.tex or add a new *.tex document demonstrating your feature/fix.

If you use TexLive, you can generate the class and documentation with latexmk:

latexmk pittetd.ins
latexmk -f -pdf pittetd.dtx