preface in thesis latex

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Submit and publish your thesis.

• The Graduate Thesis: What is it?
• Thesis Defences
• Deadlines and Fees
• Formatting in MS Word

Formatting in LaTeX

• Making Thesis Accessible
• Thesis Embargo
• Review and Release
• Your Rights as an Author
• Re-using Third Party Materials
• Creative Commons Licenses for Theses
• Turning Thesis into an Article
• Turning Thesis into a Book
• Other Venues of Publication

For formatting instructions and requirements see the Formatting section of the School of Graduate Studies website. The thesis style template for LaTeX ( ut-thesis ) implements these requirements. You are not required to use the template, but using it will make most of the formatting requirements easier to meet.

►► Thesis template for LaTeX .

Below are some general formatting tips for drafting your thesis in LaTeX.  In addition, there are other supports available:

• Regular LaTeX workshops are offered via the library, watch the library workshop calendar at https://libcal.library.utoronto.ca/
• With questions about LaTeX formatting, contact Map and Data Library (MDL) using this form
• There are also great resources for learning LaTeX available via Overleaf

Many common problems have been solved on the TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange Q & A Forum

LaTeX Template

To use the LaTeX and ut-thesis , you need two things: a LaTeX distribution (compiles your code), and an editor (where you write your code). Two main approaches are:

• Overleaf : is a web-based platform that combines a distribution (TeX Live) and an editor. It is beginner-friendly (minimal set-up) and some people prefer a cloud-based platform. However, manually uploading graphics and managing a bibliographic database can be tedious, especially for large projects like a thesis.
• A LaTeX distribution can be installed as described here . ut-thesis can then be installed either: a) initially, with the distribution; b) automatically when you try to compile a document using \usepackage{ut-thesis} ; or manually via graphical or terminal-based package manager for the distribution.
• The LaTeX distribution allows you to compile code, but provides no tools for writing (e.g. syntax highlighting, hotkeys, command completion, etc.). There are many editor options that provide these features. TeXstudio is one popular option.

Occasionally, the version of ut-thesis on GitHub  may be more up-to-date than the popular distributions (especially yearly TeX Live), including small bug fixes. To use the GitHub version, you can download the file ut-thesis.cls (and maybe the documentation ut-thesis .pdf ) and place it in your working directory. This will take priority over any other versions of ut-thesis on your system while in this directory.

LaTeX Formatting Tips

Here are a few tips & tricks for formatting your thesis in LateX.

Document Structure

Using the ut-thesis document class, a minimal example thesis might look like:

\documentclass{ut-thesis} \author {Your Name} \title {Thesis Title} \degree {Doctor of Philosophy} \department {LaTeX} \gradyear {2020} \begin {document}   \frontmatter   \maketitle   \begin {abstract}     % abstract goes here   \end {abstract}   \tableofcontents   \mainmatter   % main chapters go here   % references go here   \appendix   % appendices go here \end {document}

►►  A larger example is available on GitHub here .

You may want to consider splitting your code into multiple files. The contents of each file can then be added using \input{filename} .

The usual commands for document hierarchy are available like \chapter , \section , \subsection , \subsubsection , and \paragraph . To control which appear in the \tableofcontents , you can use \setcounter{tocdepth}{i} , where i = 2 includes up to \subsection , etc. For unnumbered sections, use \section* , etc. No component should be empty, such as \section{...} immediately followed by \subsection{...} .

Note: In the examples below, we denote the preamble vs body like:

preamble code --- body code

Tables & Figures

In LaTeX, tables and figures are environments called “floats”, and they usually don’t appear exactly where you have them in the code. This is to avoid awkward whitespace. Float environments are used like \begin{env} ... \end{env} , where the entire content ... will move with the float. If you really need a float to appear exactly “here”, you can use:

\usepackage{float} --- \begin{ figure}[H] ... \end {figure}

Most other environments (like equation) do not float.

A LaTeX table as a numbered float is distinct from tabular data. So, a typical table might look like:

\usepackage{booktabs} --- \begin {table}   \centering   \caption {The table caption}   \begin {tabular}{crll}     i &   Name & A &  B \\     1 &  First & 1 &  2 \\     2 & Second & 3 &  5 \\     3 &  Third & 8 & 13   \end {tabular} \end {table}

The & separates cells and \\ makes a new row. The {crll} specifies four columns: 1 centred, 1 right-aligned, and 2 left-aligned.

Fancy Tables

Some helpful packages for creating more advanced tabular data:

• booktabs : provides the commands \toprule , \midrile , and \bottomrule , which add horizontal lines of slightly different weights.
• multicol : provides the command \multicolumn{2}{r}{...} to “merge” 2 cells horizontally with the content ... , centred.
• multirow : provides the command \multirow{2}{*}{...} , to “merge” 2 cells vertically with the content ... , having width computed automatically (*).

A LaTeX figure is similarly distinct from graphical content. To include graphics, it’s best to use the command \includegraphics from the graphicx package. Then, a typical figure might look like:

\usepackage{graphicx} --- \begin {figure}   \centering   \includegraphics[width=.6 \textwidth ]{figurename} \end {figure}

Here we use .6\textwidth to make the graphic 60% the width of the main text.

By default, graphicx will look for figurename in the same folder as main.tex ; if you need to add other folders, you can use \graphicspath{{folder1/}{folder2/}...} .

The preferred package for subfigures is subcaption ; you can use it like:

\usepackage{subcaption} --- \begin {figure} % or table, then subtable below   \begin {subfigure}{0.5 \textwidth }     \includegraphics[width= \textwidth ]{figureA}     \caption {First subcaption}   \end {subfigure}   \begin {subfigure}{0.5 \textwidth }     \includegraphics[width= \textwidth ]{figureB}     \caption {Second subcaption}   \end {subfigure}   \caption {Overall figure caption} \end {figure}

This makes two subfigures each 50% of the text width, with respective subcaptions, plus an overall figure caption.

Math can be added inline with body text like $E = m c^2$ , or as a standalone equation like:

\begin {equation}   E = m c^2 \end {equation}

A complete guide to math is beyond our scope here; again, Overleaf provides a great set of resources to get started.

Cross References

We recommend using the hyperref package to make clickable links within your thesis, such as the table of contents, and references to equations, tables, figures, and other sections.

A cross-reference label can be added to a section or float environment using \label{key} , and referenced elsewhere using \ref{key} . The key will not appear in the final document (unless there is an error), so we recommend a naming convention like fig:diagram , tab:summary , or intro:back for \section{Background} within \chapter{Intro} , for example. We also recommend using a non-breaking space ~ like Figure~\ref{fig:diagram} , so that a linebreak will not separate “Figure” and the number.

You may need to compile multiple times to resolve cross-references (and citations). However, this occurs by default as needed in most editors.

The LaTeX package tikz provides excellent tools for drawing diagrams and even plotting basic math functions. Here is one small example:

\usepackage{tikz} --- \begin {tikzpicture}   \node [red,circle]  (a) at (0,0) {A};   \node [blue,square] (b) at (1,0) {B};   \draw [dotted,->]   (a) -- node[above]{ $ \alpha $ } (b); \end {tikzpicture}

Don’t forget semicolons after every command, or else you will get stuck while compiling.

There are several options for managing references in LaTeX. We recommend the most modern package: biblatex , with the biber backend.  A helpful overview is given here .

Assuming you have a file called references.bib that looks like:

@article{Lastname2020,   title = {The article title},   author = {Lastname, First and Last2, First2 and Last3 and First3},   journal = {Journal Name},   year = {2020},   vol = {99},   no = {1} } ...

then you can cite the reference Lastname2020 using biblatex like:

\usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex} \addbibresource {references.bib} --- \cite {Lastname2020} ... \printbibliography

Depending on what editor you’re using to compile, this may work straight away. If not, you may need to update your compiling command to:

pdflatex main && biber main && pdflatex main && pdflatex main

Assuming your document is called main.tex . This is because biber is a separate tool from pdflatex . So in the command above, we first identify the cited sources using pdflatex , then collect the reference information using biber , then finish compiling the document using pdflatex , and then we compile once more in case anything got missed.

There are many options when loading biblatex to configure the reference formatting; it’s best to search the CTAN documentation for what you want to do.

Windows users may find that biber.exe or bibtex.exe get silently blocked by some antivirus software. Usually, an exception can be added within the antivirus software to allow these programs to run.

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because LaTeX matters

Writing a thesis in latex.

Writing a thesis is a time-intensive endeavor. Fortunately, using LaTeX, you can focus on the content rather than the formatting of your thesis. The following article summarizes the most important aspects of writing a thesis in LaTeX, providing you with a document skeleton (at the end) and lots of additional tips and tricks.

Document class

The first choice in most cases will be the report document class:

See here for a complete list of options. Personally, I use draft a lot. It replaces figures with a box of the size of the figure. It saves you time generating the document. Furthermore, it will highlight justification and hyphenation errors ( Overfull \hbox ).

Check with your college or university. They may have an official or unofficial template/class-file to be used for writing a thesis.

Again, follow the instructions of your institution if there are any. Otherwise, LaTeX provides a few basic command for the creation of a title page.

Use \today as \date argument to automatically generate the current date. Leave it empty in case you don’t want the date to be printed. As shown in the example, the author command can be extended to print several lines.

For a more sophisticated title page, the titlespages package has a nice collection of pre-formatted front pages. For different affiliations use the authblk package, see here for some examples.

Contents (toc/lof/lot)

Nothing special here.

The tocloft package offers great flexibility in formatting contents. See here for a selection of possibilities.

Often, the page numbers are changed to roman for this introductory part of the document and only later, for the actual content, arabic page numbering is used. This can be done by placing the following commands before and after the contents commands respectively.

LaTeX provides the abstract environment which will print “Abstract” centered as a title.

The actual content

The most important and extensive part is the content. I strongly suggest to split up every chapter into an individual file and load them in the main tex-file.

In thesis.tex:

In chapter1.tex:

This way, you can typeset single chapters or parts of the whole thesis only, by commenting out what you want to exclude. Remember, the document can only be generated from the main file (thesis.tex), since the individual chapters are missing a proper LaTeX document structure.

See here for a discussion on whether to use \input or \include .

Bibliography

The most convenient way is to use a bib-tex file that contains all your references. You can download bibtex items for articles, books, etc. from Google scholar or often directly from the journal websites.

Two packages are commonly used to personalize bibliographies, the newer biblatex and the natbib package, which has been around for many years. These packages offer great flexibility in customizing the look of a bibliography, depending on the preference in the field or the author.

Other commonly used packages

• graphicx : Indispensable when working with figures/graphs.
• subfig : Controlling arrangement of several figures (e.g. 2×2 matrix)
• minitoc : Adds mini table of contents to every chapter
• nomencl : Generate and format a nomenclature
• listings : Source code printer for LaTeX
• babel : Multilingual package for standard document classes
• fancyhdr : Controlling header and footer
• hyperref : Hypertext links for LaTeX
• And many more

Minimal example code

I’m aware that this short post on writing a thesis only covers the very basics of a vast topic. However, it will help you getting started and focussing on the content of your thesis rather than the formatting of the document.

Share this:

16 comments.

8. June 2012 at 7:09

I would rather recommend a documentclass like memoir or scrreprt (from KOMA-Script), since they are much more flexible than report.

8. June 2012 at 8:12

I agree, my experience with them is limited though. Thanks for the addendum. Here is the documentation: memoir , scrreprt (KOMA script)

8. June 2012 at 8:02

Nice post Tom. I’m actually writing a two-part (or three) on Writing the PhD thesis: the tools . Feel free to comment, I hope to update it as I write my thesis, so any suggestions are welcome.

8. June 2012 at 8:05

Thanks for the link. I just saw your post and thought I should really check out git sometimes :-). Best, Tom.

8. June 2012 at 8:10

Yes, git is awesome. It can be a bit overwhelming with all the options and commands, but if you’re just working alone, and probably on several machines, then you can do everything effortlessly with few commands.

11. June 2012 at 2:15

That’s what has kept me so far. But I’ll definitely give it a try. Thanks!

8. June 2012 at 8:08

What a great overview. Thank you, this will come handy… when I finally get myself to start writing that thesis 🙂

8. June 2012 at 14:12

Thanks and good luck with your thesis! Tom.

9. June 2012 at 4:08

Hi, I can recommend two important packages: lineno.sty to insert linenumbers (really helpful in the debugging phase) and todonotes (allows you to insert todo-notes for things you still have to do.)

11. June 2012 at 0:48

Thanks Uwe! I wrote an article on both, lineno and todonotes . Here is the documentation: lineno and todonotes for more details.

12. June 2012 at 15:51

Thanks for the post, i’m currently writing my master thesis 🙂

A small note: it seems that subfig is deprecated for the subcaption package: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Captions#Subfloats

12. June 2012 at 16:05

Hey, thanks for the tip. Too bad they don’t say anything in the documentation apart from the fact that the packages are not compatible.

1. August 2012 at 21:11

good thesis template can be also found here (free): http://enjobs.org/index.php/downloads2

including living headers, empty pages, two-sided with front and main matter as well as a complete structure

2. August 2012 at 11:03

Thanks for the link to the thesis template!

15. November 2012 at 22:21

Hi Tom, I’m writing a report on spanish in LaTex, using emacs, auctex, aspell (~170pags. ~70 files included by now) and this blog is my savior every time because I’m quite new with all these.

The question: Is there anyway (other than \- in every occurrence) to define the correct hyphenation for accented words (non english characters like é)? I have three o four accented words, about the subject of my report, that occur near 100 times each, across several files, and the \hyphenation{} command can’t handle these.

20. November 2012 at 3:47

I was wondering what packages you load in your preamble. For a better hyphenation (and easier typing), you should use these packages:

See here for more details.

If this doesn’t help, please provide a minimal working example to illustrate the problem.

Thanks, Tom.

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Overleaf for Scholarly Writing & Publication: LaTeX Theses and Dissertations

• Reference Managers and Overleaf
• Adding Graphs, Tables, and Images
• Using Templates on Overleaf
• LaTeX Theses and Dissertations

LaTeX Theses and Dissertatons

Tips and tools for writing your LaTeX thesis or dissertation in  Overleaf, including templates, managing references , and getting started guides.

Managing References

BibTeX  is a file format used for lists of references for  LaTeX  documents. Many citation management tools support the ability to export and import lists of references in .bib format. Some reference management tools can generate  BibTeX  files of your library or folders for use in your  LaTeX  documents.

LaTeX on Wikibooks   has a  Bibliography Management  page.

Find list of BibTeX styles available on Overleaf   here

View a video tutorial on how to include a bibliography using BibTeX  here

Collaborate with Overleaf

Collaboration tools

Every project you create has a secret link. Just send it to your co-authors, and they can review, comment and edit. Overleaf synchronizes changes from all authors, so everyone always has the latest version. More advanced tools include protected projects and integration with Git.

Collaborate online and offline with Overleaf and Git

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Getting Started with Your Thesis or Dissertation

How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX

Writing a thesis or dissertation in LaTeX can be challenging, but the end result is well worth it - nothing looks as good as a LaTeX-produced pdf, and for large documents it's a lot easier than fighting with formatting and cross-referencing in MS Word. Review this video from Overleaf to help you get started writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard thesis template from the  Overleaf Gallery .

You can  upload your own thesis template to the Overleaf Gallery   if your university provides a set of LaTeX template files or you may find your university's thesis template already in the Overleaf Gallery.

This video assumes you've used LaTeX before and are familiar with the standard commands (see our other  tutorial videos   if not), and focuses on how to work with a large project split over multiple files.

How to Write your Thesis/Dissertation in LaTeX: A Five-Part Guide

Five-Part LaTeX Thesis/Dissertation  Writing Guide

Part 1: Basic Structure   corresponding  video

Part 2: Page Layout   corresponding  video

Part 3: Figures, Subfigures and Tables   corresponding  video

Part 4: Bibliographies with Biblatex  corresponding  video

Part 5: Customizing Your Title Page and Abstract   corresponding  video

Link Your ORCID

Link yo ur  ORCiD  account  to your  Overleaf account  via the  ORCID @ CMU Portal

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Guide to Writing Your Thesis in LaTeX

Step 4: configure the options specific to your thesis.

At this point, it is assumed that you have a working LaTeX distribution, an editor, have downloaded and installed the necessary template files, and confirmed that you can build this sample thesis . If not, do that first. Now we will explain how to set things like the title, the author name, and whether it is a masters thesis or a doctoral dissertation.

Start by opening the file thesis.tex in your editor.

Setting the Class Options

The first line of the file will be:

This tells LaTeX to use the urithesis document class with all default options. There are many options that that can be given, but for now we will only concern ourselves with one.

If this is a Ph.D. dissertation, change the first line to be:

Setting the Title and Author

To set the title, you use the command:

Make sure to use proper capitalization.

Since you will be the author, set your name using the command:

The tilde between the middle initial and the last name tells LaTeX that the period does not indicate the end of a sentence, and to use a normal interword space.

The Bibliography Source File

The references will come from one or more .bib files that you create. This is the only type of file without a .tex extension that you will need to edit. The line:

tells BibTeX to look in the file references.bib for references cited in the thesis. The argument to the \reffile command can be a comma separated list of files (without the .bib extension), and it will look in all of those files.

The Preliminary Material

The pages that come before the first chapter are called the preliminary material. See the page Guidelines for the Format of Theses and Dissertations , on the Graduate School’s web site, for more information about the preliminary material. The preliminary material includes, in this order:

The automatic sections will be generated automatically, and you need not worry about them. The List of Tables and List of Figures sections will only be generated if the thesis contains any tables or figures, respectively. The argument to the command to include the four manual sections, is the name of the .tex file that contains the content for that section, without the .tex extension. For example the abstract is included with the command:

which means it will us the contents of the file abstract.tex as the abstract. The file abstract.tex should contain only the text of the abstract, as the title will be generated automatically.

The Chapters

Chapters are included with the command:

which will include the file chapterN.tex in the thesis. There should be one \newchapter{} command for each chapter of the thesis.

The chapter source files should each begin with the command

followed by the contents of the chapter.

The Appendices

Appendices are optional, but if present, they are included with the command:

which will include the file appendixN.tex in the thesis. There should be a \newappendix{} command for each appendix of the thesis.

The main difference between appendices and chapters, are that chapters are numbered starting with 1, while appendices start with the letter A. The contents of an appendix is identical to that of a chapter. Each appendix source file should begin with the command:

command, just like with chapters.

Additional Considerations

By default, the department named on the title page is Electrical Engineering, but that can be changed by using the command:

before any of the chapters are included.

The year that the thesis is generated is displayed on the title page and approval page, but the Graduate School requires that year must be the year of your official graduation. To set that date to a specific year, other than the current year, use the command:

before the \begin{document} command.

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UCLA Thesis LaTeX style

uclathes/uclathes

Folders and files, repository files navigation, uclathes - ucla thesis latex style.

2017-04-13, release 1.4

2012-04-16, release 1.3

WHAT IS UCLATHES?

This package is a LaTeX2e document style to format UCLA dissertations and theses. This style is based on work from Leslie Lamport, Dorab Patel, Eduardo Krell, Richard B. Wales, and John Heidemann.

The UCLA Graduate Division does not recognize uclathes as a template for a thesis or dissertation. While countless students have used this template and successfully filed their manuscripts, the Graduate Division does not accept the template (or previous submissions) as an excuse for not meeting the filing requirements. If you find any bugs or have issues completing the filing process, let us know in the Issues section with a solution for future students.

WHAT IS NEW WITH UCLATHES 1.4?

UCLA has changed the style requirements for theses and dissertations again as of September 2016. These changes make manuscripts more consistent with the new electronic format that was adopted in 2012. Ryan Rosario updated uclathes-1.3 to match the new style and can confirm that it works as his dissertation was approved under the new rules in Spring 2017. Much of these changes were indicated by Sean Lake and Xiaochen Lian, and their dissertations were approved February 2017 and March 2017 respectively. Ryan's dissertation was approved in April 2017.

Specifically:

• Margins are now 1" on all sides.
• Title and author name on title and abstract pages can no longer bold.
• The small caps \textsc{..} and \scshape titles for title page headers is no longer permitted.
• Title and author name on title and abstract pages can no longer larger than the surrounding text.
• If footnotes are single spaced, they must be separated by a single blank line.

Several other changes were made to make the files less confusing to use:

• Some filenames were changed to better reflect their purpose.
• Extra files required for the demo technical report were renamed and put into an include directory.

WHAT IS NEW WITH UCLATHES 1.3?

After many years, UCLA changed the rules and moved away from paper. (They seem to still have the awful information-sparse double spacing, but maybe in 15 more years...) John Colby updated uclathes-1.2 from 1996 to match the new style, and can confirm that it works as his dissertation was approved under the new rules in late March 2012.

WHAT IS NEW WITH UCLATHES 1.2?

There's a bug in \degreeyear handling. The workaround is described below in ``KNOWN PROBLEMS''.

WHAT IS NEW WITH UCLATHES 1.1?

I slightly shrunk page size to clearly conform to the requirements (problem reported by David Gast).

An example showing dual-mode formatting is present in demo2*.tex . My dissertation is formatted either with uclathes.cls (the submission version) and with report.cls (for my committee and a technical report) because IMHO the thesis requirements are not optimal. See the manual for more details how to dual-format your document.

WHAT IS IN UCLATHES?

Enclosed in this package are the following files:

uclathes.cls, uclath17.clo, uclathti.clo These three files implement the LaTeX2e "uclathes" document class.

uclathes.bst This file implements the BibTeX "uclathes" bibliography style.

thesis_spec.tex A document describing the "uclathes" style material with tips for approval. Candidate should read the document UCLA Thesis and Dissertation Filing Requirements which is the official specification for the filing format.

demo.tex An example first few pages of the thesis. The "demo thesis" described in thesdoc.tex .

demo_techreport.tex and all files in the include directory These files are not necessary for filing, but provide another demonstration thesis that can be formatted as a technical report (latex demo_techreport ),

Makefile Automates TeX'ing documents.

README.md The file you are now reading.

HOW TO INSTALL UCLATHES

The simplest way to install uclathes is to copy *.cls, *.clo, and *.bst into the directory where you run LaTeX.

Alternatively, you can copy these files into wherever LaTeX looks for its inputs.

WHERE'S THE REAL DOCUMENTATION

Rich Wales has prepared a good manual for uclathes. Read thesdoc.ps (or format and read thesdoc.tex ) before proceeding.

Moving forward, documentation will be centralized on the GitHub wiki at: https://github.com/uclathes/uclathes/wiki

IMPORTANT: The UCLA Graduate Division maintains a document titled UCLA Thesis and Dissertation Filing Requirements . As of April 2017, the manual is outdated, but the checklist on page 25 is updated and is used to approve manuscripts. https://grad.ucla.edu/gasaa/etd/filingrequirements.pdf

WHERE TO GET UCLATHES

The most recent version of this package can always be found at: https://github.com/uclathes/uclathes/tarball/master

ISPELL GOBBLYGOOK

LocalWords: uclathes Dorab Patel Eduardo Krell cls uclath clo uclathti bst ps BibTeX thesdoc tex README vesion URL http www html mac rep ti isi TeX'ing GOBBLYGOOK LocalWords bf rc LaTeX Lamport degreeyear Gast Makefile usepackage newlfont oldlfont

KNOWN PROBLEMS

\bf doesn't work, I get the error:

You're running LaTeX2e, and \bf isn't enabled by default. You should choose if you want new or old semantics and put \usepackage{newlfont} or \usepackage{oldlfont} in your document. I purposely did not include one of these packages in uclathes.cls to encourage people to convert to the new macros.

• If you don't specify a \degreeyear , the value on the title page may be wrong. (This bug occurs in demo.ps .)

Work around: always specify \degreeyear .

Alternate work around: find a real uclathes maintainer to fix the bug.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT BUGS

If a thesis formatted with uclathes is rejected by the Theses and Dissertations Advisor, please let us know so we can update it accordingly.

Uclathes is distributed as reply-ware. If you get it and use it and graduate, you're strongly encouraged to send me some e-mail to let me know that my work was not in vain.

--John Heidemann, 12 Jan 1996

mailto:[email protected]

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How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 2): Page Layout

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Author: Josh Cassidy (August 2013)

This five-part series of articles uses a combination of video and textual descriptions to teach the basics of writing a thesis using LaTeX. These tutorials were first published on the original ShareLateX blog site during August 2013; consequently, today's editor interface (Overleaf) has changed considerably due to the development of ShareLaTeX and the subsequent merger of ShareLaTeX and Overleaf. However, much of the content is still relevant and teaches you some basic LaTeX—skills and expertise that will apply across all platforms.

In the previous tutorial we looked at setting up the basic structure for a thesis. In this post we'll start customising the page layout using the geometry and fancyhdr packages. We'll continue working on the same project as last time and the first thing we will do is make the document two-sided so that we save paper by printing on both sides. To do this we add the keyword twoside into the document class command:

The geometry package

Next we'll load up the geometry package. To configure the page layout, we enter instructions into the square brackets of this command. The first thing we will do is change the paper size. By default the paper size is set to US letter but we'll change this to a4paper . Next we'll change the width of the text by entering the keyword width followed by an equals sign and a number in millimetres. We can also change the margin sizes at the top and bottom of the page:

You will notice that on even pages the text is positioned slightly closer to the right-hand side and on odd pages it's closer to the left. Or in other words, the inner margin is smaller than the outer:

This is due to us specifying the twoside option but it often confuses people. The reason LaTeX does this is because when you bind the document together, the smaller inner margins will be adjacent and then combined will be a similar size to the larger outer margins. This mean that the three columns of white space you get with a double page spread will be a similar size:

However, you may also want to compensate for the actual binding. To do this we will use the bindingoffset command and we'll choose to offset it by 6mm:

You can see that the margins have now shifted:

The fancyhdr package

Next we'll add in headers and footers using the fancyhdr package. First let's load up the package. Immediately after the \usepackage command we need to add the \pagestyle command and enter fancy into the curly brackets:

If we now compile the code you will see that a header has been added to all the pages except the title page, the contents page and the first page of each new chapter. By default, the headers all contain the chapter and section titles:

If you're happy with this layout you can leave it like this. However, I'm going to show you how you can customise it using two commands provided by the fancyhdr package: \fancyhead and \fancyfoot . The standard format for these commands is the command followed by square brackets and then curly brackets:

In the curly brackets we enter the text we want and in the square brackets we specify which parts of the header we want that text printed in. The fancyhdr package lets us add things in the left (L), right (R) and centre (C) of the header or footer and also lets us specify a different arrangement depending on whether its on an odd (O) or even (E) page. Here's an example of how we might customise our headers and footers:

Here's the meaning of the various commands used in the above LaTeX fragment:

• In the first line we've entered a blank \fancyhead command which clears all the header fields.
• In the second line we've told LaTeX that we want the text "Thesis title" on the right-hand side of the header for the odd pages and the left for even pages.
• The third line clears the footer fields using a blank \fancyfoot command.
• The fourth line makes the page number appear on the left of the footer for an even page and the right for an odd. The \thepage command returns the page number of the page it's used on.
• The \thechapter command in line five is similar to \thepage but, of course, typeset the chapter number.
• Lines five and six add some text about the chapter and author into the footer again in different places depending on whether the page is odd or even.

Now if we compile the document with this code in we can see the headers and footers have been added in:

Before moving on I should briefly introduce you to two more commands that you may find helpful when customising your headers and footers. The \leftmark and \rightmark commands. Here's an example of what the \leftmark command produces:

And an example of what the \rightmark command produces:

To change the thickness of the lines in the headers and footers we use this code entering a size in points:

I recommend you keep it fairly small to keep it looking sensible.

Finally I want to mention the \pagestyle command. If we have a page that we want completely clear of headers and footers, we can use this command entering the the keyword empty in as an argument; for example:

If we want a page with no headers or footers except for a simple page number at the bottom we would use the keyword plain . However you need to be aware that using this command changes the page style for all the pages following the command. Therefore we need to turn the page style back to fancy as soon as we want the headers back.

This concludes our discussion on page layout. In the next post we'll look at using images and tables.

All articles in this series

• Part 1: Basic Structure ;
• Part 2: Page Layout ;
• Part 3: Figures, Subfigures and Tables ;
• Part 4: Bibliographies with BibLaTeX ;
• Part 5: Customising Your Title Page and Abstract .
• Documentation Home
• Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes

Overleaf guides

• Creating a document in Overleaf
• Uploading a project
• Copying a project
• Creating a project from a template
• Using the Overleaf project menu
• Including images in Overleaf
• Exporting your work from Overleaf
• Working offline in Overleaf
• Using Track Changes in Overleaf
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Document structure

• Sections and chapters
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• Cross referencing sections, equations and floats
• Nomenclatures
• Management in a large project
• Multi-file LaTeX projects
• Lengths in L a T e X
• Headers and footers
• Page numbering
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• Text alignment
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• Single sided and double sided documents
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• Using colours in LaTeX
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Field specific

• Theorems and proofs
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• Molecular orbital diagrams
• Chess notation
• Knitting patterns
• CircuiTikz package
• Pgfplots package
• Typesetting exams in LaTeX
• Attribute Value Matrices

Class files

• Understanding packages and class files
• List of packages and class files
• Writing your own package
• Writing your own class

Advanced TeX/LaTeX

• In-depth technical articles on TeX/LaTeX

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