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I am a regular user of LaTeX. I have written my Master's thesis in the book \documentclass and it worked out pretty well, given I did not know many useful packages back then to make it look nicer. I would like to know which are the packages that you find useful to organize and structure a doctoral thesis in Physics? For example, mathtools, tikz and tcolorbox are few packages that are indispensable for writing equations, positioning and editing figures and making tables for notes, highlights and similar.
Since our thesis consists of an introduction and collection of all articles written during PhD, is there a nice structure to follow? Like including the papers as separate tex file so that fonts and styles of all the papers match? I am trying to build a template from scratch so all nitty-gritty details are welcome.

tachyon
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    "I have written my Master's thesis [..] and it worked out pretty well [but I want] to make it look nicer" If you think that this or that package will improve your document, of course, use it, but first: What really needs to be improved or beautified? Are you writing for sciences experts focused in the contents or for childrens that needs a lot of ornaments to pay some attention to the text? If first case, "nicer" could be even self-defeating, beside that as more packages you use, more probability of problems. When in doubt, always apply the KISS principle! – Fran Sep 08 '20 at 09:43
  • @Fran, I meant organised and highlights of my work and results, like in a box-like environment for example. The audience is science researchers. – tachyon Sep 08 '20 at 09:48

2 Answers2

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In addition to @oliversm answer, the memoir class (a superset of book and report) provides many means to enhance the appearance of your thesis. The documentation (> texdoc memoir) describes, and provides the code for, an example book design and a thesis design.

Peter Wilson
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Some of the obvious ones

There are several obvious ones, such as amsmath, and a few of the ones you have mentioned. Of course it would be remiss not to mention the physics package, although it is a bit of a matter of taste (cf. Alternatives to the physics package), although I generally like it.

Some of the less obvious

Some of the tools I have found great include:

  • todonotes (package)
  • latexdiff (a command line tool)
  • cleveref (package)
  • citet and citep from natbib (package).
  • lineno and setspace (packages, great for proof reading).

How to structure your thesis

This is a matter of taste and department regulations. Some allow a collection of papers, others one coherent thesis, so I won't comment on this much more.

oliversm
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