Clean Thesis – A clean, simple, and elegant LaTeX style for thesis documents | Hacker News Reader

Clean Thesis – A clean, simple, and elegant LaTeX style for thesis documents

cleanthesis.der-ric.de

176 pointsnoqqe72 comments

If the creator is reading this: Your web pages would be immediately improved 100% by adding a link to a PDF file generated using this style, showing most of what goes into a typical thesis. (You could use your own thesis for which it was developed, or just a pile of lorem ipsum.)

I see that you have links to JPEGs of sample pages, but this would be much better. [EDITED to add: I am not suggesting that you remove the JPEGs. They don't do any harm.]

https://github.com/derric/cleanthesis/blob/master/thesis-exa...

Excellent!

Very strange for me to see an example thesis in latex without any mathematics in it!

And a must-have is an example with:

- pictures

- tables

- formulas

When you can't find it in the sample PDF, you assume that adding them will be some sort of visual hell...

Yes. And code. Without a LaTex & PDF example that includes all the pieces, the text layout isn't particuluarly interesting.

Many institutions, including mine, require a very specific style. Many even provide templates. Irritatingly, mine only provided a Word template, so I had to spend a day or two creating a LaTeX style. (Procrastination bonus: I was "working on my thesis" without actually working on my thesis). The mere fact that the provided style uses color would disqualify it as a thesis in many institutions. Also, it's somewhat distasteful that the linked site uses significantly more words on how I can donate for this derivative work than it spends on convincing me to use it.

In fairness, the donation is not monetary. It is probably more aptly described as "Contribution".

Isn't the LaTeX stylesheet for your thesis usually dictated by your university? It was for me at least..

Not necessarily, wasn't for me (Oxford, just for specificity). Some universities do mandate, but they do that in .doc format for example. Tell them you write your thesis in LaTeX and often it can be "oh, okay...."

No, many universities only require a front page, the rest is up to you.

My university doesn't even provide this front page in LaTex ...

Mine autogenerates the front and just inserts it at the start of my pdf file.

My university had a set of stylesheets (.doc, LaTeX and I think InDesign) and set of rules you had to follow if you wanted to make your own stylesheet.

You're right, most universities dictate what style you should use. However, if you wanted to publish your thesis for your own personal use it might be nice to port it to this clean thesis format.

In my case, I only had to use a predetermined stylesheet for the title page.

I've heard of one university (there must be others) where there's a thick compendium that specifies exactly which font to use where on each page, what spacings and margins to use, how to format the table of contents, etc. Not actually a LaTeX stylesheet you can use, but a list of rules that you manually have to make sure your thesis conforms with. Of course, the rules were written with MS Word in mind, but math/CS/science people who need to use LaTeX have to replicate the rules in detail. Of course, there's a person employed by the university to check that your submitted thesis exactly conforms with the rules, or else it will be rejected.

The person who told me this might have embellished the story, but sadly it sounds all too plausible to me.

20+ years ago, my university's formatting rules were pre-computer-age, and the asked a guy in the IT department (a friend of mine) to create e a new set of rules. The new rules were entirely based on MS Word.

I think ours was just a style one from ACM. IT made it easy to publish papers because the format was already correct.

At the University of Chicago, the thesis office didn't give any indication that they'd ever heard of LaTeX. But they did hand us a long list of formatting requirements (precise margins, contents format, lots of other details) and it was clear that any deviation from those would result in your thesis being handed right back to you.

Fortunately, there was a LaTeX style file that had been handed around the physics department for years that generations of grad students had tuned to meet the requirements. Doing my part, I tweaked it a bit to handle some special cases that came up in my thesis (and, I think, to clean up the code in one or two places) and passed it on to the next generation. (I shudder to think of how many forks there must have been; I saw at least two or three while I was preparing my version. Maybe someone has put a canonical version on GitHub by now: nothing of the sort was really on our radar back then.)

Put on github instead of passing it down? Might not work for non-comp-sci students that use LaTeX, but are not familiar with git.

True. I started using Subversion and then Mercurial for writing scientific papers during grad school (a distributed VCS was handy when editing on multiple machines), but it never seemed worth the effort to teach my collaborators how to use them from scratch.

There are lot of people who use Dropbox for its version control features, albeit limited they might be. It might not scale well with many users and branching, but it's probably good enough for two researchers editing the same paper on two different machines in the same office.

There might be a market for a good automated multi user version control (no programming required)…

Same exact story here, I even whipped up a quick web page[1] to share the modifications I made to the stylesheet with other students. Amazingly it looks like the site is still up after 10+ years so kudos to the webmasters, with the files still downloadable and links still alive; looking back on the page is a hilarious nostalgia trip for me, it was written by hand and has a hit counter (of course): [1] http://homepage.usask.ca/~ebs642/

Similar issue at Stanford, right down to there being a Keeper of the LaTeX Style. I certainly couldn't have used any old off-the-shelf style that I happened to like.

University of Chicago can't afford secretaries? What do they put academics through this crap? This is part of why PhD students drop out and become dotcom millionaires instead of academics.

Nobody ever explains to grad students that they can ask the secretaries to do this stuff. I didn't figure it out until I got a tenure-track job.

Yep. For me, the PhD LaTeX stylesheet was a file passed down and updated from graduate student to graduate student for who knows how many decades in my dept.

It's usually passed down from student to student through departments. Which reminds me: I never put my own patches to the Technion thesis template on a public platform. I need to do that!

Not at the University of Bordeaux :D

Me too. In the comp sci department, at least, one of the professors made a compliant style a long time ago and it continues to get passed around. I'm defending on Thursday and so far there haven't been any real complaints other than a requirement that my figure captions be at the top of the figure instead of the bottom. Not a biggie.

I thought the default style(s) were the results of years of micro tweaking and deep studies of the impact of character positioning and flows by Knuth and that only the default \LaTeX{} style could give that 2% head start or that A instead of a B++ for any essay.

Now we add blue titles ? And sans serif font ?

Sarcasm apart, it looks good. Some links are 404 on the page though (classic thesis, etc.).

Indeed, blue titles evoke MS Word. As pointed out, a PDF rendered with this style would be great help in understanding it. Perhaps it's a good choice for on-screen reading, but shouldn't you go with serif typefaces when laying out for print?

A long time ago I did some googling (aka `research') on the subject and indeed I found out that using serif for printed documents is non negotiable ; it's supposed (and I agree with that) to let the eyes decrypt words faster and smoother than when reading sans serif. Oddly enough sans serif is easier to decipher on screens. I don't know yet which kind of fonts I should use on my e-reader though.

The web seems to think it's a matter of taste and adequacy nowadays:

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2013/03/serif-vs-sans-the-fi...

http://designshack.net/articles/typography/serif-vs-sans-ser...

http://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-1/type...

Those studies focused on geometric sans serif fonts like Helvetica. Humanist sans fonts have been demonstrated to have higher legibility in print.

You seem to confuse TeX and LaTeX. Knuth himself doesn't do LaTeX so the default styles aren't from him.

It's been a while since I read the documentation to KOMAscript and Memoir but I think both contain some criticism on Lamport's default styles.

There is nothing wrong per se with a sans serif font for titles as long as it fits to the serif font for the main text. I'm not quite convinced though that this is the case here.

BTW, the README states that this layout has been "inspired by user guide documents from Apple Inc." So don't bash on the ground it might look like a Word document. ;-)

> You seem to confuse TeX and LaTeX. Knuth himself doesn't do LaTeX so the default styles aren't from him.

Oops, mea culpa. You're right, I mixed both thinking Latex and Tex were quite equivalent in term of style rendering. I never bothered looking into Tex, I just wrote some Latex classes (and documents, of course).

> BTW, the README states that this layout has been "inspired by user guide documents from Apple Inc." So don't bash on the ground it might look like a Word document. ;-)

Oh but Word wasn't on my mind at all when I commented. I even followed the link on keynote to see what was the reference (since I never looked at keynote or iLifexxx documentation).

Basically....

TeX is low level formatting...like pre-CSS HTML... with the equivalent of <font> tags every where.

LaTeX is like CSS...being a set of markup-driven global rules.

I doubt there were deep studies, because there so much of a document's design is a matter of taste. For example, Don Knuth really liked a certain generation of math journals, so he built TeX and CM to emulate that. Just because it's the default doesn't mean it's an optimal design.

I'm partial to serif fonts, and Scala in particular, but Apple's design documents are beautiful too, and I can't begrudge someone wanting to emulate their design.

+1. The blue titles, the unnecessary lines and the fact that he branded it with the whole Clean<bold>Thesis</bold> thing doesn't really sound clean in my book.

I'm currently looking for a thesis template as well, but the more I come across (1) the more I just want to do something like http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/.

(1) http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/326/latex-templates-f...

This link got me started in TeX (I was just barely aware of its existence before). http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex

Not a thesis template at all, but great ideas and it sheds some light on how to get decent typography.

On a side note, I think it would be great to have a good WYSIWYG TeX editor for office/basic user level of proficiency. Typesetting does matter, it profoundly impacts reading, which is particularly relevant when you're giving 300+ pages of your hard work for someone else to read. It would be very good for everyone to get decent default typesetting. Unfortunately, our alternatives are:

* Word/typical word processors, which are are horrible at typesetting;

* TeX, which is good, but it's hard for most people and has an aura of complexity (it's code, after all...);

* Publishing software, such as Adobe InDesign, which are indeed great at typesetting, but only if you know what you are doing. This is professional software, which is clearly not aimed at common users.

Check out Lyx

I've wrote my Bachelor thesis in LyX and it's awesome, especially for math!

If someone is interested (it's about Bitcoin and in German), here's the source: http://www.math.uni-bremen.de/~jhasse/Bachelor-Arbeit.zip And here's the PDF: http://www.math.uni-bremen.de/~jhasse/Kryptografische%20Grun... Nothing fancy like Clean Thesis though. I like the http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ approach better ;)

I just finished a rant on a certain tex forum about how LaTeX adds 10x complexity (to TeX + plainTeX) for making end-user's life about 10% easier.

My two cents:

- Once you become a moderately advanced LaTeX user, you need more control over your document.

- This almost exclusively leads to a preamble that is a complete mess of spaghetti code.

- Putting that mess in a separate file doesn't solve the issue, only hides it.

- Another view is that if your preamble is a mess, your document is screaming at you to create your own documentclass (or rename the class you're using and modify it).

- But that requires you become familiar with LaTeX (and TeX) internals.

- But that is way harder than becoming familiar with TeX + PlainTeX.

Therefore, as an intermediate to advanced TeX user I'm beginning to believe that TeX + PlainTeX is a much better approach. Although you'd sacrifice advanced functionality of hundreds of LaTeX packages, but people who wrote those packages could've easily written TeX macro-collections. LaTeX is used more only because it has more momentum behind it; otherwise PlainTex is a much cleaner approach.

If you're willing to get under the hood of the whole system, I highly recommend Knuth's The TeXbook.

P.S.: Just for comparison, LaTeX *.ltx files are about ~10,000 LOCs compared to ~1200 LOCs of plain.tex (which is fully documented in Appendix B of The TeXbook).

Yeah I don't understand this sans serif font either.

In many universities the problem is that you need to produce a thesis according to the university specifications. A generic thesis document may help with this, but will unfortunately never solve the complete problem. Fortunately, however, most universities also have a local LaTeX guru, or you can just copy the style used by previous students.

Where I did mine, they required submissions in strict word formatting.

What's going to happen whem Word is dead is 20 years and they have all these useless files?

There's a very good chance that they'll end up being transformed into PDFs before being released, and will also end up in print.

http://cleanthesis.der-ric.de/img/ct_toc.jpg

Using 2 different sans-serif fonts in the same document (here: Helvetica and the TeX humanist) is usually frowned upon by typographers. One reason is that differences in size, style, color, etc. should always be noticable. Two sans-serif fonts will always look superficially similar; the eye has to get used to different letter forms when it expects the font to stay the same.

Beyond that, I think the template is really beautiful. Thanks for sharing!

For mine I used KOMA-Script Package (scrbook) http://www.dickimaw-books.com/latex/thesis/thesis-screen.pdf (and for official documentation: http://www.ctex.org/documents/packages/nonstd/koma-script.pd...).

Stop wasting time coming up with elegant thesis formats and finish your thesis!

What on this site told you he did not already? And why your tone of voice, emanating from your comment?

The only time anybody cares about the formatting of a thesis is when they are not finishing one. ;-)

He was making a joke.

"This text should contain all letters of the alphabet..."

Except for Z and Q. Those don't count.

Anyone have a good template / project for homework assignments that typically have code snippets, graphs, images and formulas?

If I were teaching right now, I would gladly accept iPython. It is what I now use for reports containing similar content, doing R&D in industry.

Another excellent template... https://github.com/kks32/phd-thesis-template

no example?

https://github.com/kks32/phd-thesis-template/blob/master/the...

A quick look on Github told me you are not using the memoir package for this. Could the author please elaborate why it is not using memoir?

Because he's using scrreprt from KOMAscript as base class.

Ah, thanks.

LaTeX rule them all when it's time to write a thesis. This template is nice. The code is simple so a beginner can start to play with at any moment. Keep working hard I love what you did.

Anyone got a similar resource for self publishing ebooks? I had some stuff hacked together with org-mode and some other bits a while ago, but would like to know of anything better.

You can look into softcover/polytexnic here: https://github.com/softcover/softcover , I believe it had a decent .tex style for a book. Also very powerful pipeline for producing .epub/.mobi from .tex

Another excellent style sheet to look into is the Tufre-style book: http://www.latextemplates.com/template/tufte-style-book

I'd also be happy to share some of the .tex header I use for my book---just some customizations on the vanilla book documentclass. It's fairly hacky stuff, but it works ;)

Softcover looks awesome. Thanks!

It's not LaTeX, but a historian recently posted on HN his work flow for using plaintext and Pandoc for writing papers [1]. I've been using markdown+pandoc [2] for a book of stories for my family. TeX/LateX exerts nearly absolute (albeit, gorgeous) control over layout, whereas e-book readers often provide the reader with many configurable layout options. Thus, e-book formats tend towards a content-with-minimal-layout-hints way of handling layout. I'm finding markdown plus pandoc a good fit for the latter.

[1] http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/my-academic-book-in-plain-text.html

[2] https://puppetlabs.com/blog/automated-ebook-generation-conve...

google for pandoc...

My university dictates the style of a thesis so no chance there but it looks good.

That's thesis style infinity out of infinity +1. Nothing special, weird fonts, lots of wasted space.

That's just thesis style infinity + 1, nothing special, a lot of wasted space due to huge numbers.

wasted space = more pages!

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