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How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 5): Customising Your Title Page and Abstract

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Author: Josh Cassidy (August 2013)

This five-part series of articles uses a combination of video and textual descriptions to teach the basics of writing a thesis using LaTeX. These tutorials were first published on the original ShareLateX blog site during August 2013; consequently, today's editor interface (Overleaf) has changed considerably due to the development of ShareLaTeX and the subsequent merger of ShareLaTeX and Overleaf. However, much of the content is still relevant and teaches you some basic LaTeX—skills and expertise that will apply across all platforms.

In the previous post we looked at adding a bibliography to our thesis using the biblatex package . In this, the final post of the series, we're going to look at customising some of the opening pages. In the first video we made a rather makeshift title page using the \maketitle command and by using an \includegraphics command in the \title command. Although this works, it doesn't give us as much flexibility as we may want.

The Title Page

A much better way to do this is to use the titlepage environment. We'll do this in a separate .tex file and then input it. The first thing we'll do is enclose everything in the title page within the center environment so it's all aligned to the centre. Next we need to instruct L a T e X to leave a gap between the top of the page and the first line of text. To do this we use the \vspace command followed by a length. We also need to add an asterisk into the command to make sure L a T e X doesn't decide to ignore the command. Next we'll add the thesis title in bold font using the \textbf command. To leave a gap between this and the next line of text we use the \vspace command again, this time without the asterisk. Next we'll add in a subtitle followed by some more vertical space and then the author name in bold font. This concludes what we want at the top of the title page—the rest of the content we'll add at the bottom of the title page.

To separate these two sections out we'll use the \vfill command which will automatically add in the amount of vertical space needed for the content to fill the page. Next we'll add in a line of text to specify what degree the thesis is being submitted for. The double backslash is used to create a new line. We'll then add more space before adding in the university logo specifying it's width as a fraction of the text width. Finally we'll add in some information about the university and the date.

Now in the main .tex file we can replace the \maketitle command with an input command linked to our new title page. If we now compile the code we can see all the items have been correctly processed:

However, the text is quite small so we'll go back and change the font sizes. To do this we'll use one of the simple font-sizing commands. There are ten of these to choose from, ranging from smallest to largest they are:

Let's make the title as big as it can be (using these simple commands) by choosing \Huge . We'll then make the subtitle two steps smaller using \large . When we use one of these commands they affect all the text in it's scope. Therefore in it's current state all the remaining text on the page will appear in the size of the subtitle. We'll keep it like this for the author name and degree title but we'll drop down one size for the university details and the date:

The abstract

We can also customise other pages, such as the abstract. Instead of using an unnumbered chapter, we'll create a new .tex file, customise the layout and then input it. At the top of this file we need to change the page style to plain in order to stop the headers being added in. Now in a similar way to the title page we'll add in some custom titles and then the abstract text.

This is what it will look like added in:

This concludes our series on writing a basic thesis. If you want to play around with the thesis we've created in this series you can open the project in Overleaf .

All articles in this series

• Part 1: Basic Structure ;
• Part 2: Page Layout ;
• Part 3: Figures, Subfigures and Tables ;
• Part 4: Bibliographies with BibLaTeX ;
• Part 5: Customising Your Title Page and Abstract .
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PhD/MPhil Thesis - a LaTeX Template

A new version of this, by Krishna Kumar, is available. Features include -

• Conforms to the Student Registry PhD dissertation guidelines and CUED PhD guidelines
• Supports LaTeX, XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX
• Adaptive Title Page: Title page adapts to title length
• Title page with both College and University crests.
• Print / On-line version: Different layout and hyper-referencing styles
• Pre-defined and custom fonts (Times / Fourier / Latin Modern) with math support
• Supports system fonts (XeLaTeX)
• Pre-defined and custom bibliography style support (authoryear / numbered / custom)
• Custom page styles: 3 Different Header / Footer styles
• Pre-defined and custom margin size
• A separate abstract with thesis title and author name, along with the titlepage can be generated by passing the argument abstract to the document class.
• Option to generate only specific chapters and references without the frontmatter and title page. Useful for review and corrections.
• Draft mode: Draft water mark, timestamp, version numbering and line numbering

July 2018: On CUED's central Linux system, you'll need to change Preamble/preamble.tex , commenting out the \usepackage{siunitx} ... line by putting a % symbol at the start of it. (some of our packages are too out of date)

Downloading

• LaTeX Template - https://github.com/kks32/phd-thesis-template/releases/tag/phd-latex-template-latest-stable
• LaTeX Template - https://github.com/kks32/phd-thesis-template/releases/latest
• LyX Template - https://github.com/kks32/PhDThesisLyX/releases

Older versions are still available, but no longer supported.

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because LaTeX matters

Writing a thesis in latex.

Writing a thesis is a time-intensive endeavor. Fortunately, using LaTeX, you can focus on the content rather than the formatting of your thesis. The following article summarizes the most important aspects of writing a thesis in LaTeX, providing you with a document skeleton (at the end) and lots of additional tips and tricks.

Document class

The first choice in most cases will be the report document class:

See here for a complete list of options. Personally, I use draft a lot. It replaces figures with a box of the size of the figure. It saves you time generating the document. Furthermore, it will highlight justification and hyphenation errors ( Overfull \hbox ).

Check with your college or university. They may have an official or unofficial template/class-file to be used for writing a thesis.

Again, follow the instructions of your institution if there are any. Otherwise, LaTeX provides a few basic command for the creation of a title page.

Use \today as \date argument to automatically generate the current date. Leave it empty in case you don’t want the date to be printed. As shown in the example, the author command can be extended to print several lines.

For a more sophisticated title page, the titlespages package has a nice collection of pre-formatted front pages. For different affiliations use the authblk package, see here for some examples.

Contents (toc/lof/lot)

Nothing special here.

The tocloft package offers great flexibility in formatting contents. See here for a selection of possibilities.

Often, the page numbers are changed to roman for this introductory part of the document and only later, for the actual content, arabic page numbering is used. This can be done by placing the following commands before and after the contents commands respectively.

LaTeX provides the abstract environment which will print “Abstract” centered as a title.

The actual content

The most important and extensive part is the content. I strongly suggest to split up every chapter into an individual file and load them in the main tex-file.

In thesis.tex:

In chapter1.tex:

This way, you can typeset single chapters or parts of the whole thesis only, by commenting out what you want to exclude. Remember, the document can only be generated from the main file (thesis.tex), since the individual chapters are missing a proper LaTeX document structure.

See here for a discussion on whether to use \input or \include .

Bibliography

The most convenient way is to use a bib-tex file that contains all your references. You can download bibtex items for articles, books, etc. from Google scholar or often directly from the journal websites.

Two packages are commonly used to personalize bibliographies, the newer biblatex and the natbib package, which has been around for many years. These packages offer great flexibility in customizing the look of a bibliography, depending on the preference in the field or the author.

Other commonly used packages

• graphicx : Indispensable when working with figures/graphs.
• subfig : Controlling arrangement of several figures (e.g. 2×2 matrix)
• minitoc : Adds mini table of contents to every chapter
• nomencl : Generate and format a nomenclature
• listings : Source code printer for LaTeX
• babel : Multilingual package for standard document classes
• fancyhdr : Controlling header and footer
• hyperref : Hypertext links for LaTeX
• And many more

Minimal example code

I’m aware that this short post on writing a thesis only covers the very basics of a vast topic. However, it will help you getting started and focussing on the content of your thesis rather than the formatting of the document.

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16 comments.

8. June 2012 at 7:09

I would rather recommend a documentclass like memoir or scrreprt (from KOMA-Script), since they are much more flexible than report.

8. June 2012 at 8:12

I agree, my experience with them is limited though. Thanks for the addendum. Here is the documentation: memoir , scrreprt (KOMA script)

8. June 2012 at 8:02

Nice post Tom. I’m actually writing a two-part (or three) on Writing the PhD thesis: the tools . Feel free to comment, I hope to update it as I write my thesis, so any suggestions are welcome.

8. June 2012 at 8:05

Thanks for the link. I just saw your post and thought I should really check out git sometimes :-). Best, Tom.

8. June 2012 at 8:10

Yes, git is awesome. It can be a bit overwhelming with all the options and commands, but if you’re just working alone, and probably on several machines, then you can do everything effortlessly with few commands.

11. June 2012 at 2:15

That’s what has kept me so far. But I’ll definitely give it a try. Thanks!

8. June 2012 at 8:08

What a great overview. Thank you, this will come handy… when I finally get myself to start writing that thesis 🙂

8. June 2012 at 14:12

Thanks and good luck with your thesis! Tom.

9. June 2012 at 4:08

Hi, I can recommend two important packages: lineno.sty to insert linenumbers (really helpful in the debugging phase) and todonotes (allows you to insert todo-notes for things you still have to do.)

11. June 2012 at 0:48

Thanks Uwe! I wrote an article on both, lineno and todonotes . Here is the documentation: lineno and todonotes for more details.

12. June 2012 at 15:51

Thanks for the post, i’m currently writing my master thesis 🙂

A small note: it seems that subfig is deprecated for the subcaption package: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Captions#Subfloats

12. June 2012 at 16:05

Hey, thanks for the tip. Too bad they don’t say anything in the documentation apart from the fact that the packages are not compatible.

1. August 2012 at 21:11

good thesis template can be also found here (free): http://enjobs.org/index.php/downloads2

including living headers, empty pages, two-sided with front and main matter as well as a complete structure

2. August 2012 at 11:03

Thanks for the link to the thesis template!

15. November 2012 at 22:21

Hi Tom, I’m writing a report on spanish in LaTex, using emacs, auctex, aspell (~170pags. ~70 files included by now) and this blog is my savior every time because I’m quite new with all these.

The question: Is there anyway (other than \- in every occurrence) to define the correct hyphenation for accented words (non english characters like é)? I have three o four accented words, about the subject of my report, that occur near 100 times each, across several files, and the \hyphenation{} command can’t handle these.

20. November 2012 at 3:47

I was wondering what packages you load in your preamble. For a better hyphenation (and easier typing), you should use these packages:

See here for more details.

If this doesn’t help, please provide a minimal working example to illustrate the problem.

Thanks, Tom.

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The MIT thesis template in LaTeX

The latex template.

The current MIT thesis template was developed in 2023, using up-to-date LaTeX coding, to meet the current formatting requirements of the MIT Libraries. The title and abstract pages are automatically laid out from information provided by the user. This template includes options to use a variety of fonts, and it is compatible with either pdfTeX or unicode engines such as luaLaTeX. When using LaTeX formats dated November 2022 or later, the resulting pdf file meets the PDF/A-2b archivability standard. A standard TeX Live installation includes all other packages required by the template.

This template was written by John Lienhard at the request of the MIT Libraries.

• Documentation: Documentation for the template is available in pdf format here .
• Download: The most current LaTeX files for this template are distributed through the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN): https://ctan.org/pkg/mitthesis Download
• Overleaf.com: A copy of the thesis template is also present in Overleaf.com's template gallery, here . Overleaf includes all the packages in TeX Live, so no additional downloads are needed. Learn more about Overleaf at MIT .

Specifications for MIT theses

The formatting requirements for MIT theses are set by the MIT Libraries, as described at this url: http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/thesis-specs/ . Questions regarding these specifications should be directed to [email protected] .

The original LaTeX 2.09 template was written by Stephen Gildea in the late 1980s (also in CTAN, here ). That template was edited by many later students, leading to the files archived here.

LaTeX has changed greatly since the original MIT thesis template was written. LaTeX 2.09 was replaced by LaTeX2e in 1994. New engines were developed, particularly pdfTeX during the 1990s and Unicode-aware engines in the decades that followed. Many packages and fonts were developed to accompany the original platform, particularly after 2000; and major updates to the LaTeX kernel began in 2018. Over the years, the MIT Libraries have changed the required format several times, especially as electronic thesis submission has become the norm. The original template served MIT well; but by the early 2020s, it was substantially out of date. That situation motivated the creation of this new template.

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Guide to Writing Your Thesis in LaTeX

Step 4: configure the options specific to your thesis.

At this point, it is assumed that you have a working LaTeX distribution, an editor, have downloaded and installed the necessary template files, and confirmed that you can build this sample thesis . If not, do that first. Now we will explain how to set things like the title, the author name, and whether it is a masters thesis or a doctoral dissertation.

Start by opening the file thesis.tex in your editor.

Setting the Class Options

The first line of the file will be:

This tells LaTeX to use the urithesis document class with all default options. There are many options that that can be given, but for now we will only concern ourselves with one.

If this is a Ph.D. dissertation, change the first line to be:

Setting the Title and Author

To set the title, you use the command:

Make sure to use proper capitalization.

Since you will be the author, set your name using the command:

The tilde between the middle initial and the last name tells LaTeX that the period does not indicate the end of a sentence, and to use a normal interword space.

The Bibliography Source File

The references will come from one or more .bib files that you create. This is the only type of file without a .tex extension that you will need to edit. The line:

tells BibTeX to look in the file references.bib for references cited in the thesis. The argument to the \reffile command can be a comma separated list of files (without the .bib extension), and it will look in all of those files.

The Preliminary Material

The pages that come before the first chapter are called the preliminary material. See the page Guidelines for the Format of Theses and Dissertations , on the Graduate School’s web site, for more information about the preliminary material. The preliminary material includes, in this order:

The automatic sections will be generated automatically, and you need not worry about them. The List of Tables and List of Figures sections will only be generated if the thesis contains any tables or figures, respectively. The argument to the command to include the four manual sections, is the name of the .tex file that contains the content for that section, without the .tex extension. For example the abstract is included with the command:

which means it will us the contents of the file abstract.tex as the abstract. The file abstract.tex should contain only the text of the abstract, as the title will be generated automatically.

The Chapters

Chapters are included with the command:

which will include the file chapterN.tex in the thesis. There should be one \newchapter{} command for each chapter of the thesis.

The chapter source files should each begin with the command

followed by the contents of the chapter.

The Appendices

Appendices are optional, but if present, they are included with the command:

which will include the file appendixN.tex in the thesis. There should be a \newappendix{} command for each appendix of the thesis.

The main difference between appendices and chapters, are that chapters are numbered starting with 1, while appendices start with the letter A. The contents of an appendix is identical to that of a chapter. Each appendix source file should begin with the command:

command, just like with chapters.

Additional Considerations

By default, the department named on the title page is Electrical Engineering, but that can be changed by using the command:

before any of the chapters are included.

The year that the thesis is generated is displayed on the title page and approval page, but the Graduate School requires that year must be the year of your official graduation. To set that date to a specific year, other than the current year, use the command:

before the \begin{document} command.

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LaTeX template for theses (i.e. dissertation) at the Institute of Geomechanics and Underground Technology at RWTH Aachen

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Master's thesis latex template.

"LaTeX is a document preparation system. When writing, the writer uses plain text as opposed to the formatted text found in WYSIWYG ("what  you see is what you get") word processors. The writer uses markup tagging conventions to define the general structure of a document (such as article, book, letter, or thesis), to stylise text throughout a document (such as bold and italics), and to add citations and cross-references. A TeX distribution such as TeX Live or MikTeX is used to produce an output file (such as PDF or DVI) suitable for printing or digital distribution. Within the typesetting system, its name is stylised as L a T e X ." — Adopted from Wikipedia. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX )

• Linux/Unix — sdsu-thesis-latex.tar.gz
• Windows — sdsu-thesis-latex.zip
• Note: The generated sample pdf is available because many people asked for it, not because it is a good idea to use it as a reference. The style file and sample LaTeX document contain instructions and comments on why/how certain things were done in a certain way...
• Note: Official Unofficial Guide for Thesis Chairs
• Note: Official LaTeX format approval form; this is an official SDSU form — Do Not Edit .
• Peter Blomgren ( [email protected] , webpage ) reviews LaTeX theses for the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and the Computational Sciences program; thus bypassing the review by Montezuma Publishing
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Guide to BibTeX Type MasterThesis

BibTeX is a reference management tool that is commonly used in LaTeX documents. The “masterthesis” BibTeX type is used for master’s theses. In this guide, we will explain the required and optional fields for the “masterthesis” BibTeX type.

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Required Fields

The “masterthesis” BibTeX type requires the following fields:

• author : The author of the thesis.
• title : The title of the thesis.
• school : The name of the institution that awarded the degree.
• year : The year the degree was awarded.

Optional Fields

In addition to the required fields, the “masterthesis” BibTeX type also has a number of optional fields that can be used to provide additional information. These fields include:

• type : The type of the thesis, such as “Master’s thesis”.
• address : The location of the institution.
• month : The month the thesis was submitted.
• note : Any additional information about the thesis.

Here is an example of how to use the “masterthesis” BibTeX type:

In this example, the BibTeX entry defines a master’s thesis authored by Jane Doe titled “A Study of Example”. The degree was awarded in 2022 by the University of Example, and the thesis was submitted in June in Example City, CA. The type of the thesis is specified as “Master’s thesis”, and a note is included that provides a URL for the thesis.