LaTeX template for a doctoral thesis at University of Luxembourg#

A LaTeX template for PhD theses is available on GitLab at R3/outreach/templates/thesis.

The repository includes several main items of interest:

• In the guidelines/ directory, there is a snapshot of the official “Practical information for Prospective PhD candidates” PDF, which contains some official recommendations regarding the thesis formatting. The snapshot is provided there only for convenience and its version is not necessarily authoritative – ask your supervisor and committee if there is a newer version.

• The thesis template itself, present mainly in files thesis.tex and macros.tex. You are supposed to fill in your credentials into metadata.tex, and then continue editing the other files (summary.tex, intro.tex, …) with the usual LaTeX thesis contents.

• A simple build system for producing a PDF with the typeset thesis. If you develop in GitLab or on GitHub, the thesis repository is configured so that it will automatically run a CI and produce a PDF artifact with the thesis whenever you push a new commit. To build the thesis yourself on your computer, you should be able to do it using any standard, sufficiently recent TeXlive distribution, or alternatively using Docker. The documentation in the repository README.md contains several hints on how to do that.

• The default thesis text (that you are supposed to erase and rewrite) contains some minor hints about the structure of the thesis (mainly the headings of the 4 main chapters), and various collected advice and demos on how to nicely typeset the usual material that is found in the theses, such as citations, figures, tables, mathematics, cross-references, appendices, etc. Various other things (table of contents, section numbering, …) work automatically and correctly by default.

The official requirements on the thesis formatting are, apart from the mandatory contents of the front page, committee member list and affidavit, mostly free-form. You are allowed to customize most of the thesis look to match the style and topic of your thesis and the requirements of your supervisor.

In case you think the thesis template should be updated, please open an issue in GitLab or send a merge request. Common concerns that substantiate opening an issue include the following:

• Because the official recommendations and requirements on the thesis form may change in the future, in case you find any serious discrepancy between the current recommendations and the thesis template, please let the template maintiners know by opening the issue, so that it can get corrected. If possible, attach whatever document that summarizes the new guidelines.
• If you require some specific LaTeX functionality that you think should be present in the template (such as advanced indexes, lists of floats/figures/tables, special typesetting and fonts, …).
• If you want to share a hard-learned truth or a good approach to solve common problems with other students.