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University of Stuttgart PhD Thesis Template

Unofficial LaTeX template for PhD theses at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.

For a template for master, bachelor and other thesis, please head to the scientific thesis template.

• Features
• Example PDFs
• Prerequisites
• Usage
• Renaming the template
• VSCode configuration
  • LTeX tips and tricks
• Using with your git repository
  • Initialization
  • Merging updates from the template

Features

• UTF-8 files
• output format is A5
• title page
• nice chapter headings
• important LaTeX packages are enabled
• TeX4ht conversion enabled by make html
• biblatex+biber instead of plain bibtex
• latexmk

Example PDFs

• Thesis: thesis-example.pdf
• Book cover: cover.pdf
• Spine of the book cover: spine.pdf

Prerequisites

• Windows: Recent MiKTeX
• Mac OS X: Recent TeX Live (e.g. through MacTeX) - Try sudo tlmgr update --all if you encounter issues with biblatex
• Linux: Recent TeX Live distribution

Usage

• thesis-example.tex is the main document
• make or latexmk for compilation
• make clean or latexmk -C for cleaning up

Renaming the template

You probably don't want your document to be named example. In order to change this, replace the term thesis-example by e. g. thesis-musterfrau in the following locations:

location	occurrence
cover-print/cover.tex	\includegraphics{../thesis-example.pdf}
.gitignore	thesis-example.pdf
.gitignore	thesis-example*.png
Makefile	MASTER_TEX = thesis-example.tex

VSCode configuration

To use the setup in VSCode, install

• LaTeX Workshop to support LaTeX in VSCode and
• LTeX to have a nice spell cheker that also identifies grammar issues

Then, change the setting of LaTeX Workshop to use biber. Therefore, update the following lines in the VSCode settings.json to contain:

    "latex-workshop.latex.recipes": [
        {
            "name": "pdflatex ➞ bibtex ➞ pdflatex × 2 🔃",
            "tools": [
                "pdflatex",
                "bibtex",
                "pdflatex",
                "pdflatex"
            ]
        },
    ],
    "latex-workshop.latex.tools": [
        ...
        {
            "name": "bibtex",
            "command": "biber", # make sure this is not bibtex!
            "args": [
                "%DOCFILE%"
            ],
            "env": {}
        },
        ...
    ],

The following settings are additionally recommended:

{
    "editor.wordWrap": "on",                              # enable soft line breaks
    "latex-workshop.view.pdf.viewer": "tab",              # display the generaded PDF in a separate tab
    "latex-workshop.view.pdf.backgroundColor": "#cccccc", # use a darker background in de PDF viewer to 
                                                            lift of the pages from it
    "latex-workshop.latex.autoBuild.run": "onSave",       # automatically build on saving .tex files
    "editor.renderWhitespace": "all",                     # display all whitespaces
}

Alternatively, just copy and paste the contents of the vscode.settings.json file to your VSCode settings file.

LTeX tips and tricks

LTeX is an offline grammar and spell checker with support for LaTeX and Markdown.

Add a magic comment to your files to tell LTeX which language to use:

% LTeX: language=de-DE

If you want to use different langauges in the text, use the \foreignlanguage{language}{text}} command. LTeX will detect these elements and automatically switch the spell checker's lanaguge. For example:

\foreignlanguage{english}{Therefore, our proposed approach is the best in the world.}

Using with your git repository

Initialization

This howto assumes that you have not a git repository for your thesis. If you have, just add https://github.com/latextemplates/uni-stuttgart-dissertation-template.git as upstream and merge the branch upstream/main into your main branch.

1. Open command line
2. git clone https://github.com/latextemplates/uni-stuttgart-dissertation-template.git
3. cd uni-stuttgart-dissertation-template
4. git remote rename origin github
5. git checkout -b main

Now, you are on the main branch, where you can write your thesis and push it to your (remote) origin repository, in case you have one.

Merging updates from the template

If you want to merge updates from github, do the following:

1. git fetch github
2. git merge github/main