I'm Ahmed Mohamed Rashed Desoki, an assistant professor at Aerospace Engineering Department, Cairo University.

I created this thesis template to show you how you can create a professional thesis using Open Source Software (OSS). Chapters of this template themselves concisely explain the necessary background you need to know about LaTeX, LyX, floating figures and tables, equations, references management, vector graphics, Inkscape, including program codes and others.

I strongly urge you to prepare your thesis file from the very beginning of your research. This is invaluable since it enables you to immediately document and cite every piece of new information you learn. I strongly urge you to stick to immediate documentation and citation as you learn. Citation itself expresses the value of your writing. You will find your citations invaluable especially after you read and learn a lot. At this time you will really fail to remember from where you learned every information.

This template is hosted at https://github.com/ahmed-rashed/ThesisTemplate. Usage of this template is licensed under GNU GPLv3 (www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html). If you just want to use this template, simply download it as a zip file using https://github.com/ahmed-rashed/ThesisTemplate/archive/master.zip and proceed. While you are using this template, if you faced problems, try hard to read, learn and dig for solutions by yourself. If you improved/corrected/debugged/extended this template, then please [clone] the template repository using Git by "$ git clone https://github.com/ahmed-rashed/ThesisTemplate.git", and kindly (In fact, you have to share your improvements according to the GNU GPLv3 license.) send me your modifications as a [pullrequest]. Also if you have suggestions, corrections, bugs or improvement, please send them a [pullrequest]. If you don't know what is Git, you can find concise explanation in chapter [chap:Version-Control-Using], or in [#Git_Tower_Ebook].

Finally, foreign languages usually causes some problems to LaTeX documents. Arabic is not an exception. So if you faced a strange problem that you cannot solve, try disabling the Arabic parts of this thesis to check if the problem is related to the Arabic language (Mostly the problem is not specific to Arabic, but to several other languages as well.). To do so, just use the Thesis_English.lyx file. If disabling Arabic solved your problem, please try hard to find a solution and reactivate the Arabic again. Arabic scientists cannot help their nations using any language other than Arabic.