About writing a thesis in LaTeX

Question

I was wondering if it would be a good idea to learn LaTeX for writing my graduate thesis. It would be helpful for me if you answer the following questions (any extra advice will be welcome).

The questions are:

Is it possible to import charts that i have in Open office, excel, etc?
Is there a special version of latex for writing mathematical formulas?
Is there any advice before being involved with it?
Do you know about webpages with simple tutorials?

Welcome to TeX.SX! 1: yes. 2: 'regular' LaTeX is enough. 3: dare, it's worth it - even if it takes a bit of time. 4: see above. — ebosi, May 25 '17 at 00:51
You may also be interested in Writing a thesis with LaTeX or Using LaTeX to Write a PhD Thesis. — greyshade, May 25 '17 at 02:11
@santimirandarp To get an overview of the pieces of software involved and how they connect, see What TeX software to write technical papers with. — Alan Munn, May 25 '17 at 03:24
I am writing my thesis with latex and i am a beginner; i am using the classicthesis package and getting comfortable really fast. Works wonderful with the help of this forum for some problems! — it8, May 25 '17 at 06:05
@santimirandarp I suggest to you this link: http://www.miede.de/# This is the author of classicthesis. Here you will find everything you need about this package. — it8, May 25 '17 at 06:13
If you need more help just text me i will be happy to be usefull to you. By the way on which subject are you working to write your thesis? @santimirandarp — it8, May 25 '17 at 06:16
@iacopo the last link does not work, i do not know why. I am making theoretical calculations of free energy of reactions in aqueous media, what about you? — , May 25 '17 at 06:42
My advice: Stay away from big templates like classicthesis or cleanthesis or MastersDoctoralThesis or somethign just called Thesis. Please have a look at LaTeX for a Thesis. — Johannes_B, May 25 '17 at 08:03

JPi · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-25T01:59:19.747

Yes, graphs in several graphics formats including jpg, pdf, and png can be include using \includegraphics of the graphicx package. But your graphs will look a lot better if you'd use the pgfplots package and create the graphs using that; pgfplots can read csv files.
All versions of LaTeX handle mathematical formulas. There are WYSIWYG tools like Lyx, but I would not recommend them. With modern editors like texstudio, texshop, and the like, one has the source in one window and the pdf output in another.
Lots. For a thesis, the memoir class is something to consider. Have a look at tikz also for graphics. My favorite packages includemathtools (which loads amsmath) and cleveref.
There are many good references including the `Latex companion' (dead tree book) and https://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf

Pgfplots is one tool that can produce nice graphs. But if you already use another tool, make sure to import them in a vector form like pdf. It's not worth learning Pgfplots on top of LaTeX unless you have to learn something to do your graphs. Don't use jpg for anything except photos. Even computer-generated raster graphics should use png. — Chris H, May 25 '17 at 08:32

About writing a thesis in LaTeX

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