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Using LaTeX for thesis writing at the University of Washington

You are encouraged to use our custom class file when formatting your Master or Doctoral thesis. It helps you follow the Graduate School guidelines and also provides easy solutions to some of thesis formatting's more challenging tasks: landscape and facing page figures and tables.
This new and improved class file was revised on April 15, 2008, and conforms to the the May 2007 edition of the Graduate School's Style Manual.
Documentation
Preformatted documentation is available in
Download
Get the
License
This thesis package is licensed under the terms of the Apache License 2. You are free to copy, use, and modify it to your needs according to the terms of that license.

FAQ

  1. My thesis is too high (too low, left, right) on the page.
    Usually this is due to your printer driver (often dvips) not being setup quite right. Sometimes all that's needed is a

    \voffset some_small_dimension


  2. The Graduate School say my ... isn't formatted right.
    If the ... is in the preliminary pages, or in the bibliography, you may have included a macro package that redefined one of the uwthesis macros. The definition of \thebibliography often gets clobbered. Look to see what each defines and find some agreement between them.


  3. I used the natbib package and lost the Bibliography line from the table of contents.
    After the package reference

    \usepackage{natbib}

    Add the line

    \def\bibpreamble{\protect\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Bibliography}}


  4. I have more than 99 figures (or tables) and the figure numbers in the List of Figures run into the figure titles.
    Set the width of the number part of the line with this definition:
    \makeatletter
    \renewcommand*\l@figure{\setlength\@tempdima{2.3em}%
        \@dottedtocline{1}{1.5em}{\@tempdima}}
    \makeatother
    

    • The number 2.3 in the above definition is the default width (in ems) of the field. Adjust it as needed.
    • The definition must go somewhere between \documentclass and \begin{document}.
    • Substitute l@table to adjust the List of Tables.


  5. Is there a layout file so I can use LyX?
    In a manner of speaking there is. I think LyX is a little too wysiwyg for a thesis, but you can try. We have a layout and an lyx template you can try. See the download section.

Index

  • Documentation
  • Download
  • License
  • FAQ

  • Jim Fox
    UW Technology
    University of Washington
    fox@washington.edu

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