More LaTeX on Athena: MIT Thesis (AC-52)

In order to make writing a thesis as easy as possible, Athena has assembled a set of files for use with the LaTeX text formatter. These files will help make sure that your finished thesis will conform to the requirements for a thesis as stated in the Specifications for Thesis Preparation document at MIT, available in your departmental office.

This document (More LaTeX: MIT Thesis) covers:

Preparing a thesis on Athena involves advanced topics in LaTeX, as well as familiarity with Emacs and a UNIX operating system. This thesis documentation assumes that you know the basic concepts of using LaTeX. If you aren't experienced with LaTeX, refer to:

Creating a thesis in LaTeX is like creating any other document in LaTeX. The remainder of this document will help you use the MIT LaTeX thesis template to prepare a thesis that meets the MIT specifications.

Managing Your Disk Quota

As your thesis gets lengthy, you may find your disk quota getting filled. In order to find out how much space you are using, type:

athena%  quota  -v

This tells you the amount of filled disk space.

There are several ways to get below your quota listed in the Athena document Managing Your Athena Account, and in on-line help. If you still find you need more space, call Athena User Accounts (253-1325), or send electronic mail to accounts@mit.edu. Be sure to include your username, the reason you need more space (e.g., you're working on your thesis), approximately how long you will need the additional space, and an estimate of how much more space you need.

General Advice

In order to avoid many problems in writing and producing your thesis, be aware of the following:

The first step in writing a thesis on Athena using LaTeX is to create a special directory for your thesis. First, type the following command to create a subdirectory called Thesis in your home directory:

athena%  mkdir  ~/Thesis

Next, type the following command to go into that new directory:

athena%  cd  ~/Thesis

Now type the following commands to copy all of the LaTeX thesis files into your thesis directory:

athena%  attach  thesis
athena%  cp  /mit/thesis/tex/*  .   (Yes, the period is required!)
cp: /mit/thesis/tex/RCS is a directory and -r not specified.
athena%   ls
README.bibliography  appb.tex             main.bib.info
README.chapter       biblio.tex           main.tex
README.main          chap1.tex            mitthesis.sty
README.text          contents.tex         propcover.tex
abstract.tex         cover.tex
appa.tex             main.bib

You can ignore the error from cp. From now on, you should do your thesis work completely within this directory. If you are interested in understanding the functions of each file (beyond the explanations in this document), you can look at the README files and at the comments (text following % or %%) contained in each of the other files. They should be fairly self-explanatory if you know the basics of LaTeX.

Writing Your Thesis Proposal

If you need to write a thesis proposal for a doctoral thesis, you can use the template file propcover.tex included with the thesis files. (Other theses generally don't require such a formal proposal.) This template file will help you produce the proposal and agreement forms for each of the members of your thesis committee.

Since you now have your own copy of this file (see the section Getting the Template Files), you can edit it using a text editor like Emacs to make your proposal. The first part of the file includes many lines that begin with the \def command, for example:

\def\title{Parallel Processor Architecture}
\def\author{Peter Nuth}
\def\addrone{305 Memorial Drive, 606C}
\def\addrtwo{Cambridge, MA  02139}

These lines beginning with \def are the lines you need to edit. You can revise the information between the curly braces, but do not edit any of the LaTeX commands outside the curly braces (e.g. change ``Peter Nuth,'' but don't change ``\author''). You can specify:

If there are fields that you do not need, just delete the example text between the braces. (Do not delete or comment out the entire line, as it may cause errors when you process the document.) For instance, if you have only two readers, leave the lines for the third reader like this:

\def\readerthree{}
\def\readerthreetitleone{}
\def\readerthreetitletwo{}

You should not need to modify anything below the text of the abstract field. Once you have everything edited, you can process propcover.tex with the latex command, then print it out using dvips, like any other LaTeX document. (See the document Essential LaTeX on Athena for more information on processing and printing LaTeX files.)

Writing Your Thesis

The following sections help you organize your thesis into three major parts, and discuss the specific LaTeX issues for each part.

Front matter

Includes the cover page, the abstract, the table of contents, and the lists of tables and figures

Body

Includes the chapters and appendices

References

or bibliography

In addition to thinking of your thesis as comprising three major parts, you may also want to separate your thesis into smaller sections (files within each part) to make the thesis, usually a long document, easier to handle. This also makes it possible to process those smaller sections independently. For example, if you only edit chapter three of your thesis during a login session, you may only want to run latex on chapter three that day instead of processing the whole document.

The main.tex file has been designed to help you maintain the parts of your thesis in separate subfiles. In the main.tex file, you include the commands to set the overall style for the document, and you specify each subfile in the proper order. The \documentclass and \usepackage commands appear in the main.tex file only, and any of the usual document options (fontnames, fontsizes, etc.) go here.

Specific information about the main.tex file and how you need to edit it appears under Creating the Body and Appendices, and Processing Your Thesis.

For your reference, there is a sample thesis at the end of this document, including both the .tex files and the final output.

Creating the Front Matter

The Cover Page

To produce a cover page, you need to supply the information specific to your thesis. Edit the file cover.tex to include the following information:

the title of your thesis

the author's name (i.e., your name)

your department

the degree your are pursuing

the date you will complete the thesis and the date you will receive the degree

your thesis supervisor

the chairperson of your department

any acknowledgements you would like to make

To edit the cover.tex file, delete the sample information between the braces and insert your information. For example, if your name was J. Random User, you would change the line:

\author{Lucien William Van Elsen}

to:

\author{J. Random User}

As you're editing the file, you will find comments in the file to help you with different issues, such as how to indicate more than one supervisor or more than one degree.

By default, the thesis will be copyrighted to MIT. If you need to copyright the thesis to yourself (as required, for example, by Course VI and Course VIII), just specify the vi documentclass option in the file main.tex (not cover.tex):

\documentclass[12pt,vi]{mitthesis}

The Abstract

To create your abstract, just replace the sample text in abstract.tex with your text. It will be incorporated into the cover material by cover.tex. (There are comments in cover.tex that explain more.)

The Table of Contents and Other Lists

The file contents.tex includes the commands that generate:

The table of contents

The list of figures

The list of tables

These lists are generated automatically, so you don't need to do anything to this file unless you want to suppress one of these lists. For example, if you don't have any tables, you can make sure that an empty list of tables is not produced by removing (or commenting out with %) the following lines from contents.tex:

\newpage
\listoftables

Likewise, if you have no figures, you can eliminate the list of figures by removing (or commenting out) the appropriate lines from the file:

\newpage
\listoffigures

Creating the Body and Appendices

You should separate your thesis into files by chapters. You can name these files anything you like. (They must have the extension .tex, however.) For example, in our sample thesis, we put the text of Chapter 1, into a file called chap1.tex, the text of Appendix A, ``Figures,'' into appa.tex, and so on. We picked letters and numbers to distinguish files, but if you rearrange the order of your chapters, this could get confusing. Descriptive names could just as easily have been used.

To include the chapters in your thesis in the right order, just edit the file main.tex to reflect your outline. After the front matter (cover page and contents) commands, use the \include command to include your chapters. Make sure the \appendix command comes just before the \include commands for files corresponding to your appendices. You do not need to specify the .tex extension. For example, here is part of the main.tex file for the sample thesis:

\include{cover}
\pagestyle{plain}
\include{contents}
\include{chap1}
\include{chap2}
\appendix
\include{appa}
\include{appb}
\include{biblio}

To indicate the chapter or appendix names, you use \chapter commands in the actual files containing the chapter or appendix text. LaTeX will number each chapter and generate a heading and an entry in the table of contents automatically for you. For smaller portions of that chapter, you should use the sectioning commands appropriate to a LaTeX report document style (\section, \subsection, \subsection, and \paragraph). Subsubsections and paragraphs are not numbered and will not appear in the table of contents.

You edit your thesis text files as you would any LaTeX document. See Essential LaTeX on Athena for details.

Including the Bibliography

How to use references, citations, and bibliographies is explained in detail in More LaTeX on Athena: Reports and Advanced Topics. Your bibliography will be automatically generated if you name your bibliographic database main.bib. Your bibliography style (plain by default) should be specified in the file biblio.tex by editing the line \bibliographystyle{plain}. To omit the bibliography, delete the line \include{biblio} from your main.tex file.

Processing, Previewing, and Printing Your Thesis

These topics are covered in more detail in Essential LaTeX on Athena. Some helpful hints are added here to make processing and previewing your thesis easier and more efficient.

Processing Your Thesis

Once you have created main.tex and the other .tex files containing the text and commands for your thesis, you need to have the latex program read it and produce a formatted .dvi file to preview or send to a printer. To process your thesis with LaTeX, type:

athena%  latex  main.tex

LaTeX prints preliminary information on your screen, then asks you which of your .tex files to process:

Enter file names to process, (chap1,chap2 ...), or `all' to process all files:

\files=

This allows you to process only a part of your thesis (if you only made minor changes) or to process the entire document. When you are ready to process the final copy, be sure to enter all.

If there are no errors in your source file, LaTeX will complete its formatting process and the athena% prompt will appear again. In this case, LaTeX has created a few new files in the current working directory. Each one has the same root name as your source file and a different extension (e.g., main.dvi is associated with main.tex).

If you have successfully processed your .tex file, and the only errors left are cross-referencing, you can run bibtex on your thesis (don't use the .tex extension on the filename), then run latex again (with the .tex extension). Note that cross-referencing errors can be caused by references to the bibliography or cross-references within the thesis document.

athena%  bibtex  main
...
athena%  latex  main.tex

You should keep running LaTeX until you are no longer prompted to run it again.

Previewing Your Document

To avoid running up print costs against your Athena print quota, it is a good idea to preview your document and revise it on-line, especially with such a long document. You can preview your main.dvi file just like any other .dvi file by using the xdvi command. More information about xdvi can be found under Essential LaTeX on Athena.

Printing Your Document

To send the most recently formatted version of your thesis to a printer, enter a command of the following form at your athena% prompt:

  dvips  -Pprintername  main.dvi

Note that the .dvi file produced by the latex program must be converted to PostScript format using dvips. Don't try to send it directly to the printer using lpr.

To print out selected pages of a file, use the -p (page) and -l (last) options to dvips. For example, to print out the pages numbered 22 to 31, you type:

   athena%  dvips -Pajax -p 22 -l 31 main.dvi

To print out the first 7 pages of the file named main.dvi on the Athena printer ajax, you type:

   athena%  dvips -Pajax -l =7 main.dvi

Use the = sign before the number to specify a sequence number rather than a real number, so that you print the first 7 pages regardless of how the pages are actually numbered.

The HP LaserJets on Athena support the capability for printing on both sides of the page, rather than just one. This is called ``duplex printing.'' To use dvips to print duplex, use the printer name follwed by a ``2,'' as in most printing commands.

There are many useful options to dvips. Type man dvips for more information.

Printing the Final Version

When your thesis is ready to be turned in, you can send it to the printer thesis, which is located in 11-004, the Copy Tech Center. This printer is loaded with archival bond paper, so you should use it for the final printout of your thesis only.

Sample Thesis (Source Files and DVI File)

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Comments and feedback to olh-suggest@mit.edu

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