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I am a student and I'm looking for a nice and enjoyable "layout" for writing my thesis (which is not so close: I'm forestalling). Now, I've read about ClassicThesis, and I gathered that this is a very good candidate. My questions for you are: Are there other styles which you would recommend, or ClassicThesis is fine? And, if so, would you help me understand how am I supposed to use it? I read about the fact that I should organize the work in folders; but how and where am I supposed to put them? I'm an apprentice in this field, and I like to learn things about LaTeX, so these are likely to be dumb questions, still I hope you will be so kind to help me. Thank you all for your time.

Marcau
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  • I think this is a bit of a misunderstanding on what classicthesis is, what layout means and what a template is. – Johannes_B Feb 06 '16 at 08:37
  • Classicthesis is a set of design decisions on top of a usual book class (scrbook), but that implementation is sometimes hacky and often leads to trouble, especially if you want to change something. If you want to change a cooking recipe, you just get a fresh piece of paper and wright down the ingredients, you don't use a pen and crossout parts and add other parts to the nice cooking book. – Johannes_B Feb 06 '16 at 08:39
  • Also have a look At your university thesis guide. They probably have a specific templare for writing theses by using LaTeX – Yorgos Feb 06 '16 at 08:51
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    @Yorgos They might do, they might not, but you are certainly right that you can start by checking :-) – Joseph Wright Feb 06 '16 at 09:11
  • The answer here suggests a structure for a document like a thesis: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/123058/subimport-and-includeonly/123096#123096 . It answers your question about folders. You can use it with any layout you like (for example, your university's template). You can even change the layout without changing the structure. – Ethan Bolker Feb 06 '16 at 15:07
  • You mention that you are an apprentice, i recommend to read some basic introductory material- which will answer most of your questions right away and help you understand what classicthesis actually is. Once you know the basics, you can have a look at LaTeX to write a thesis. – Johannes_B Feb 08 '16 at 09:21
  • In addition to PMC1234s answer explaining the usage of the package I can also recommend to have a look at arsclassica. – Manuel Schmidt Feb 06 '16 at 12:09

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I have never understood the love for classicthesis. The design is ugly, both graphically and internally. It allows for certain (very limited and specific) modifications by default, any other changes are really painful.

Just to mention a couple of the flaws: Exactly two fonts are preset (why?!), it's a package but actually does a job of a class (why?!), many dimensions are extremely hard-coded (why?!), ...

There is no good use case for it: Either you have time and want to invest time into a nicely looking thesis, and then you can go for a good "professional" solution based e.g. on KOMAscript or memoir. Or you don't have the time, and then just use the default/standard book class.

I cannot recommend classicthesis.

yo'
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    I fully agree. One other thing: the package assumes that a class with a certain option set for page layout is loaded. If not, page numbers run into the margins. – Johannes_B Feb 08 '16 at 09:36
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    I disagree with your judgment about the design (I'd not dare telling Bringhurst the design of his books is ugly). I can agree with the fact that the package should be a class and that it's too rigid and badly written. – egreg Feb 08 '16 at 10:43
  • @egreg I'm maybe a bit to strong on the looks, I mean: it's difficult to customize, so at some moment, you have to go compromises. This means you don't get what you want. – yo' Feb 08 '16 at 11:00
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    @yo' The idea under it is that it is not customizable, up to a certain point. Take it or leave it. – egreg Feb 08 '16 at 11:00
  • I do have time to write my thesis, as I said I'm anticipating because I want to have time to learn how make everything work. I'll take a look at the 'memoir' class, but I've never heard of KOMAscript. – Marcau Feb 08 '16 at 17:34
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For your first question, ClassicThesis is a good package to use for a thesis.

It is somewhat complicated to write the whole thesis on only one LaTeX code page. What needs to be done is creating folders.

First create a file for your first chapter (chapterone.tex) and write there your work. Do the same with chapters 2,3,4 etc...

Then create a main file (main.tex) where you put

\include{chapterone}
\include{chaptertwo}
\include{chapterthree}
%etc.

and compile that file. Note that you must use "\include{}" and not "\input{}".

Otherwise, if your chapters are also really large, you can do the same with the sections. But, as you will see, it will be complicated to find out the good .tex file as you will have a lot of them. Thus, you can create a folder in which you put all your sections per chapter.

Folder name : chapterone

beginning.tex

section1.tex

section2.tex

section3.tex

Folder name : chaptertwo

beginning.tex

section1.tex

section2.tex

section3.tex

Etc...

And then compile on your main.tex file the following :

%%% CHAPTER ONE %%%
\include{chapterone/beginning}
\include{chapterone/section1}
\include{chapterone/section2}
\include{chapterone/section3}

%%% CHAPTER TWO %%%
\include{chaptertwo/beginning}
\include{chaptertwo/section1}
\include{chaptertwo/section2}
\include{chaptertwo/section3}

%etc.
PMC1234
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For my thesis I used this [template]{https://github.com/kks32/phd-thesis-template/releases/tag/v2.1}. The advantage of this template is that each chapter is organised in a folder and it also contains the figures for the chapter within the folder. This is very useful when you are reviewing your work, it prevents mix-ups which could occur and also makes it easy tofocus on a single chapter.

Shivam
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