Should we have a thesis guide question?

Question

I'm anticipating a bunch of people using LaTeX for their theses and coming here for advice (kind of like the flurry of exam-related questions we had around Christmastime).

A generic CW question like "I'm writing my thesis in LaTeX; what problems will I have and what advice would you give?" could be used to (a) draw in googlers and (b) might eliminate some repeated questions.

The answers could contain links to other questions or other pointers.

I would post such a question myself but that would be all the time I would have; I can't write the answers. So when commenting or answering this question mention how much time you could contribute to this.

Answer 1

There are two things I've noticed with respect to thesis questions.

1. European (and possibly anywhere outside the US) requirements are generally minimal, while American requirements are detailed and awful.
2. American students are often using existing thesis classes/packages that vary greatly in their quality.

The upshot of this is that the kinds of questions that arise are quite different, and the two groups (i.e. Americans and non-Americans) tend to think that their mode is the norm, which can lead to some confusion.

European students have questions like "What's a good package/class for a thesis?" or "Should I put my figures in the margins?". These are often questions about typography and layout. Such questions are completely foreign to American students, since they are bound by bizarre typewriter-era fixed requirements.

American students have questions like "My table of contents must have the word "Page" on top of the page numbers. How do I do this?" or "I'm working with this (awful) package supplied by some random person at my university, and it doesn't do X correctly."

Because of these different requirements, I wonder whether a generic community wiki type question set is appropriate.

I created the thesis class that I maintain out of frustration of dealing with students who were trying to roll their own, or using existing templates of dubious quality. For American students, a question like "How do I create a thesis class for my university" might be useful.

Answer 2

One interesting thing could be a "Thesis showcase" where different solutions are shown as .tex source and as typeset PDF for being inspired what is possible and how it may look..

And collecting frequently asked questions of Ph. D. students could also be interesting.

for me personally: I always find it very interesting and inspiring to see the Thesis'es of others and see their ideas for layout etc (e. g. Lev Bishops thesis: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~lsb32/thesis/ and his remarks about the realisation with pdflatex). I'd very much like to see more such examples.

For me, there are a lot of questions about the "best" formatting

• font type and size in diagrams
• font type of sections
• how to easily create consistently formatted diagrams with whatever tool (in my case mostly IPE)

practical questions which are only (or especially) relevant for large documents like

• version control
• notes and annotations (like fixme. todo etc.)
• compiling times and how to improve compiling speed ...?

Answer 3

It's thesis season again, apparently. These questions are more or less specific to thesis formatting, and there are plenty of other recent questions where the word 'thesis' shows up in the context.

• How do I create an acknowledgment section?
• adding abstract and acknowledgement pages into table of contents
• Roman numeral page numbering

What should be the next step if we wanted to make an all-around thesis question? Make one each for the American and European types of questions? I've got plenty of experience dealing with the graduate office at my school, and a reasonably compact style file that matches all our requirements.

Answer 4

Isn't this question related?

Style/class tutorials

Answer 5

Ok, never mind. Seems to be a solution in search of a problem...