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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's nice that the readme links to an example :) I've come across countless github projects for something that seems cool, but don't have any links or screenshots of it in action.
I wrote my (phd) thesis recently, which mean I got to do a survey of the various templates for that purpose.
KOMAscripts wins, hands down. This is cute, but KOMAscript is just ridiculously featureful and customizable. It's also very well documented, can be adapted to any page format and has very good typography.
Nice and clean! I wonder if it requires a lot of tweaking to make it work with letter (it might be as trivial as changing ``paper=a4'' in the cls.) If so, it might be worth the author's time to generalize it.
I am the author. Thank you very much for the compliments! I will set this as an issue and work on it this week. Should I ping you once I have figured out how to support other formats?
I like it this way. My bachelor thesis also had no real guidelines. I frankendopted a thesis template from the Oxford University. It was ok. The biggest problem was it had already used too many latex options, so that I had to go through everything and disable what I did not understand and then make it look good again just to adjust a few settings.
But else it was ok.
So a new minimalist version is the perfect starting point.
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.