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Thesis Related Resources

Thesis Template in laTeX(download)

An Introduction to laTeX
Written by George Toderici and Sean O'Malley
COSC 6398 Fall 2003
Revised by Elisabeth Cummings (January 2004)

TeX is a very powerful macro-based text formatter written by Donald Knuth, and it is extremely popular in academia. LaTeX or Lamport TeX incorporates document styles for books, letters, slides and much more. LaTeX is a large collection of TeX macros.

Both LaTeX and TeX are distributed free of charge and run on many platforms, including Windows, many variations of UNIX, and MacOS. There are many extensions for TeX which are available, the most notable being PDFLaTeX which allows the user to produce a PDF as the output, and BibTeX which allows users to organize their bibliographies in a very easy and powerful way.

For new users, accommodating to TeX usually is a huge task, since, unlike Microsoft Word, TeX is not an editor. TeX is a language in which the user "programs". In order to obtain a graphical interface close to Word in functionality, a 3rd party program is needed.

Since TeX was developed in 1978, its creator, Donald Knuth, has offered $500 for each bug that is discovered in TeX; he still is not bankrupt!

Another major feature that TeX has is the fact that it was designed for use in academic environments. Consequently, it contains the largest database of symbols (for instance, Greek letters or Chinese characters) available to any typesetting program. Moreover, TeX allows you to extend the symbol set with as many symbols as you want. The most talked-about and most powerful feature of TeX is the fact that once you write a document you need to do very little to adapt it to a specific publication style profile (when talking about style we only mean presentation style, not the text content). When publishing an article in a magazine or journal which requires a specific format, the user can just download their .STY Style file and TeX will reformat the document according to it. This helps the magazines and publishers be consistent when publishing papers or articles, and very significantly lessens the time and energy writers must invest to produce their document according to a specific, required style guides.

A powerful feature in TeX is the built-in support for equations. TeX is renowned for the quality of the equations that it produces. Unlike Microsoft Word, TeX was specifically designed to handle mathematical equations, theorems and anything else related to mathematics or sciences. Consequently, it easily handles image placement, table generation and formatting of the pages according to required presentation styles. In fact, the user can only give "hints" to TeX on where they would like their images or tables to be placed. The hints are taken into account only when they do not violate the style constraints of the specific document style in which the user is working.

The two post-graduates that we talked to said that one of the things which they wished they had known before going into writing their thesis was TeX because it was not fun both learning LaTeX and writing the thesis. One of them was very upset she did not know about LaTeX because just sorting through the bibliographies in Word took her an enormous amount of time, while with LaTeX it would have taken only a fraction of that. This is because LaTeX automatically manages a number of very important functions: it keeps track of which citations are used and it automatically generates the bibliography index with the numbers updated whenever you add, remove, or move around references.

TeX Resources
How can I obtain TeX and LaTeX?
If you are running Linux, chances are that you already have it installed. If you do not have it installed, and you are running one of the RedHat derivatives, just download the latest LaTeX/TeX RPM from your vendor's site and install it. If you are running Debian, download the latest DEB, and if you are running Gentoo then emerge tex. If you are running anything else, please download the source code from CTAN and compile it yourself. If you are running Windows, then download MikTeX.

 

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