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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

While this is a nice work, it's unlikely to be applicable for its target audience.

in the US at least, individual (universities, schools, departments, degrees) have pre-existing Officially Sanctioned Templates For Theses, and normally failure to comply with them means your document isn't going to be accepted until it's reformatted.

For example, one of my degrees was awarded in 2016, and the version history of the thesis template I used goes back to about 1988, complete with commented out lists of contributors and notes to future generations.

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> in the US at least

There is scientific research done outside the US, and they even have PHD students. ;)

This class is perfectly good for most of Europe, as highlighted by the Readme. Most of the time, the only thing that is imposed is the general shape and the title page.

same in Japan.

As far as i can tell, the reason it's good for Europe is that it defaults to A4 paper.

I would be very surprised to discover that universities as old as many in Europe are would have _less_ byzantine document requirements than the comparatively young American unis have.

Unless things have changed much over the last decade, many European unis are much more restrictive than you imply wrt thesis formatting.

This.

I wish my MS granting university provided a template. We had guidelines that were in conflict with one another and some previous graduate's hobbled together template that matched "close enough". Every two or three students would get their document back from the graduate school for revision. It's one of the most frustrating parts of the process.

I mostly got around this because the librarian whose job it is to wrangle theses was so pleased that i could speak his language that a lot of the hassle was magically swept under the table.

Generally agree. Formatting is one thing that I recommend you not care too much about in your thesis, and if your university has something "sanctioned" it's worth using. Otherwise you may burn up 2-8 weeks trying to satisfy their requirements.

Another example (that I used): https://engineering.purdue.edu/~mark/puthesis/

Yes - I was about to say that. You don’t want to run afoul of the thesis examiner. The thesis templates and even the options in the templates used are prescribed by the graduate college.

This isn't true for masters and bachelors theses. At least, it wasn't for mine.

It was true for MS, but not BS, for me.

I think the line is "will this be archived by the university library / indexed on proquest". If yes, the institution is very likely to have a template that you are required to use.

My BA thesis is in the school's library and I was able to use any software/format I wanted in writing it.

quick google search found Columbia University's formatting requirements.

https://gsas.columbia.edu/student-guide/dissertation/formatt...

doesn't seem to be anything that particularly hard to follow with any template.

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