Notes on typesetting my thesis with latex

by Pei Qing

For my MSc dissertation, the official template is a Word document. For quite a long time, I have not used Word if I am the only one editing that document.

So many choices are out there. I personally use the following combinations for text editing:

  • Plaintext w/o markdown syntax for notes, assignments without format specs, drafts for long documents and the source of current page you are viewing
  • Emacs org-mode for documents which I have created earlier with that. E.g., a log of my expenses, some notes on lectures or weekly seminars. (I used to keep my TODO list in org-mode. Now I am using doit.im.)
  • Google Docs for collaborating with others.
  • LaTeX for serious things like reports or papers.

Writing with latex is usually painless. It is even more convenient when there are tools like pandoc which help convert my markdown drafts to latex articles. (That's how I use pandoc. It can do far more than that. Org-mode has latex export functionally as well.) However, when there's a "Word template" and the submitted electronic/printed copy must follow those requirements, you'd better pray there's an existing latex class that does all the nasty format adjustments. Unfortunately, I found nothing. No such classes for any kind of documents for HKPU. (There is a Beamer theme by Xiaofeng Qu. I saw him using it in our weekly seminar and then found it at GitHub.)

I started with puthesis class and changed whatever I find different from the official Word template. There are still some minor differences. (If not, what's the point of using late….) I'll leave this to the department general office to judge whether it is acceptable and make further changes to fulfill the requirements. If it is accepted, I'll share this document class on GitHub.

Various packages are used, if you are new to latex, read the tex environment part first for setting up a latex environment that is fully automatic.

Most of the changes are straightforward. Just search the need in natural language, e.g. "how to change chapter heading font size" and you get an answer. Some require a more recursive searching process. You look for a specific setting. Someone replies with an keyword and left. Follow that keyword and you may find a more detailed description.

The latex environment that works for me

There are various tex distributions. I have the following setup for my computers.

Mac

MacTeX.

If some command line tools are missing, I try Homebrew first.

I use TextMate at the moment. Sometimes I use Aquamacs. I used to use TeXShop.

For PDF preview, the built-in Preview.app works. If you want something else, Skim might be a good one.

Windows

There are times that I might want to check whether everything works under Windows.

Then I use MiKTeX Portable. The basic install takes much less storage than the greedy MacTeX. If a package is required, it will download and install automatically in the background. I am using the portable version because I have it synced via Dropbox. When I need a tex environment on someone else's computer, I can simply download the folder from dropbox and start using it.

The only thing that requires manual setup for this post is the pygmentize command for minted highlighting. No big deal, use listings instead. Or, install Python, easy_install and Pygment, configure the PATH and minted will work.

HOWTOs

Shortcuts

Create PDF outputs compatible with Acrobat 5.x or above

The default PDF version of pdflatex output is 1.5 (Acrobat 6.x+). To go back and use PDF 1.4, add this:

Alternatively, there is a package for this issue. Simply put the following line right after the \documentclass declaration. Some say that putting this after using other packages leads to errors. I am not sure about that. I am happy with the \pdfminorversion one and am not interested in moving the line around to get things broken...

Use EPS images with pdflatex

Being able to use PNGs or JPEGs is handy. But when you already have those EPS images, converting them to raster images does not sound good. You may use tools to convert them to PDF images which pdflatex does support. Or you could use the epstopdf package.

Then it will automatically do the conversion when a EPS image is specified in \includegraphics{}.

Move table captions from bottom to top

The way people read tables and figures might be different. Some say that table captions should appear before the reader gets to the rows and columns.

Change the separator (default is colon) in table caption

The template has a sample table whose caption is "Table #.# some text". With default settings I get "Table #.#: some text". With the caption package, change the labelsep will do.

Change line spacing

The template use different line spacings here and there. Normal text use 1.5 line spacing. So I make it the global setting.

When something should be double spacing, I wrap it with

For table of contents or bibliography, you might want \singlespacing.

Get rid of indent for first line

No first-line indent.

A blank line between paragraphs

The template specifically requite that there should be an empty line between paragraphs. I do not know why. I thought it should be a padding-bottom thing after each paragraph. With the parskip package, I can set the spacing between paragraphs.

The length is chosen by comparing the outputs at actual sizes. Change that for different fonts or font sizes.

Page number at bottom right

Page numbers are by default centered.

\minsize is the 10pt specified in the template. (12pt is the skip, i.e. distance between lines.)

Set the page margins

Set margins at edges.

For some reason, the spacing is not as semantic as it should be. The \parskip set above might be the cause. I'll check for it later.

Change chapter title format

I personally like text shadows for top level headings on webpages it they are rendered beautifully. But I do not know why this should be the case with headings in my dissertation.

The \chaptersize command is defined as

Change section headings format

I used the following to set the font size and spacing of section, subsection, subsubsection titles.

Set the heading format for bibliography

It seems the command I set above does not affect the heading format for bibliography. And I need to change the heading from "Bibliography" to "References". The following chunk of code does this.

And also the heading for Appendix

As I mentioned, all the vspaces are set because those values make the output look the same as the template.

Table of Contents, List of Figures, List of Tables

Formatting the titles and entries.

Turnoff code highlighting for print

I am using the minted package for code listings. When I wrote my bachelor's thesis, I used listings. minted is not better or worse. I just want to try something new.

If the PDF is for screen, highlighting code snippets makes sense. For hardcopies, the colored text is even harder to read.

Before this block, comment or uncomment the printmode declaration to turn print mode on and off.

Specify a root document

I have separate .tex files for each chapter, section and sometimes subsections. Then it is easier to include or exclude some of them for output. In TextMate, I hit ⌘+R to compile the document. But the sections does not have a complete document structure. The processor will stop with errors on that. Specifying a root document tells the tex command which file to process.