
Clean Thesis – A clean, simple, and elegant LaTeX style for thesis documents - noqqe
http://cleanthesis.der-ric.de
======
gjm11
If the creator is reading this: Your web pages would be immediately improved
100% by adding a link to a PDF file generated using this style, showing most
of what goes into a typical thesis. (You could use your own thesis for which
it was developed, or just a pile of lorem ipsum.)

I see that you have links to JPEGs of sample pages, but this would be much
better. [EDITED to add: I am not suggesting that you remove the JPEGs. They
don't do any harm.]

~~~
noqqe
[https://github.com/derric/cleanthesis/blob/master/thesis-
exa...](https://github.com/derric/cleanthesis/blob/master/thesis-example.pdf)

~~~
ska
Very strange for me to see an example thesis in latex without any mathematics
in it!

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ajarmst
Many institutions, including mine, require a very specific style. Many even
provide templates. Irritatingly, mine only provided a Word template, so I had
to spend a day or two creating a LaTeX style. (Procrastination bonus: I was
"working on my thesis" without actually working on my thesis). The mere fact
that the provided style uses color would disqualify it as a thesis in many
institutions. Also, it's somewhat distasteful that the linked site uses
significantly more words on how I can donate for this derivative work than it
spends on convincing me to use it.

~~~
asQuirreL
In fairness, the donation is not monetary. It is probably more aptly described
as "Contribution".

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ginko
Isn't the LaTeX stylesheet for your thesis usually dictated by your
university? It was for me at least..

~~~
Steuard
At the University of Chicago, the thesis office didn't give any indication
that they'd ever heard of LaTeX. But they did hand us a long list of
formatting requirements (precise margins, contents format, lots of other
details) and it was clear that any deviation from those would result in your
thesis being handed right back to you.

Fortunately, there was a LaTeX style file that had been handed around the
physics department for years that generations of grad students had tuned to
meet the requirements. Doing my part, I tweaked it a bit to handle some
special cases that came up in my thesis (and, I think, to clean up the code in
one or two places) and passed it on to the next generation. (I shudder to
think of how many forks there must have been; I saw at least two or three
while I was preparing my version. Maybe someone has put a canonical version on
GitHub by now: nothing of the sort was really on our radar back then.)

~~~
reagency
University of Chicago can't afford secretaries? What do they put academics
through this crap? This is part of why PhD students drop out and become dotcom
millionaires instead of academics.

~~~
Steuard
Nobody ever explains to grad students that they can ask the secretaries to do
this stuff. I didn't figure it out until I got a tenure-track job.

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johnchristopher
I thought the default style(s) were the results of years of micro tweaking and
deep studies of the impact of character positioning and flows by Knuth and
that only the default \LaTeX{} style could give that 2% head start or that A
instead of a B++ for any essay.

Now we add blue titles ? And sans serif font ?

Sarcasm apart, it looks good. Some links are 404 on the page though (classic
thesis, etc.).

~~~
hiphopyo
+1. The blue titles, the unnecessary lines and the fact that he branded it
with the whole Clean<bold>Thesis</bold> thing doesn't really sound clean in my
book.

I'm currently looking for a thesis template as well, but the more I come
across (1) the more I just want to do something like
[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/).

(1) [http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/326/latex-
templates-f...](http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/326/latex-templates-
for-writing-a-thesis)

~~~
paulojreis
This link got me started in TeX (I was just barely aware of its existence
before).
[http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex](http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex)

Not a thesis template at all, but great ideas and it sheds some light on how
to get decent typography.

On a side note, I think it would be great to have a good WYSIWYG TeX editor
for office/basic user level of proficiency. Typesetting _does_ matter, it
profoundly impacts reading, which is particularly relevant when you're giving
300+ pages of your hard work for someone else to read. It would be very good
for everyone to get decent default typesetting. Unfortunately, our
alternatives are:

* Word/typical word processors, which are are horrible at typesetting;

* TeX, which is good, but it's hard for most people and has an aura of complexity (it's code, after all...);

* Publishing software, such as Adobe InDesign, which are indeed great at typesetting, but only if you know what you are doing. This is professional software, which is clearly not aimed at common users.

~~~
JupiterMoon
Check out Lyx

~~~
jhasse
+1

I've wrote my Bachelor thesis in LyX and it's awesome, especially for math!

If someone is interested (it's about Bitcoin and in German), here's the
source: [http://www.math.uni-bremen.de/~jhasse/Bachelor-
Arbeit.zip](http://www.math.uni-bremen.de/~jhasse/Bachelor-Arbeit.zip) And
here's the PDF: [http://www.math.uni-
bremen.de/~jhasse/Kryptografische%20Grun...](http://www.math.uni-
bremen.de/~jhasse/Kryptografische%20Grundlagen%20von%20Bitcoin.pdf) Nothing
fancy like Clean Thesis though. I like the
[http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/) approach
better ;)

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coliveira
In many universities the problem is that you need to produce a thesis
according to the university specifications. A generic thesis document may help
with this, but will unfortunately never solve the complete problem.
Fortunately, however, most universities also have a local LaTeX guru, or you
can just copy the style used by previous students.

~~~
snowballsteve
Where I did mine, they required submissions in strict word formatting.

~~~
reagency
What's going to happen whem Word is dead is 20 years and they have all these
useless files?

~~~
tonyarkles
There's a very good chance that they'll end up being transformed into PDFs
before being released, and will also end up in print.

------
currysausage
[http://cleanthesis.der-ric.de/img/ct_toc.jpg](http://cleanthesis.der-
ric.de/img/ct_toc.jpg)

Using 2 different sans-serif fonts in the same document (here: Helvetica and
the TeX humanist) is usually frowned upon by typographers. One reason is that
differences in size, style, color, etc. should always be noticable. Two sans-
serif fonts will always look superficially similar; the eye has to get used to
different letter forms when it expects the font to stay the same.

Beyond that, I think the template is _really_ beautiful. Thanks for sharing!

------
stared
For mine I used KOMA-Script Package (scrbook) [http://www.dickimaw-
books.com/latex/thesis/thesis-screen.pdf](http://www.dickimaw-
books.com/latex/thesis/thesis-screen.pdf) (and for official documentation:
[http://www.ctex.org/documents/packages/nonstd/koma-
script.pd...](http://www.ctex.org/documents/packages/nonstd/koma-script.pdf)).

------
ccannon
Stop wasting time coming up with elegant thesis formats and finish your
thesis!

~~~
sdoering
What on this site told you he did not already? And why your tone of voice,
emanating from your comment?

~~~
analog31
The only time anybody cares about the formatting of a thesis is when they are
not finishing one. ;-)

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droffel
"This text should contain all letters of the alphabet..."

Except for Z and Q. Those don't count.

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zlalanne
Anyone have a good template / project for homework assignments that typically
have code snippets, graphs, images and formulas?

~~~
analog31
If I were teaching right now, I would gladly accept iPython. It is what I now
use for reports containing similar content, doing R&D in industry.

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bh13731
Another excellent template... [https://github.com/kks32/phd-thesis-
template](https://github.com/kks32/phd-thesis-template)

~~~
baby
no example?

~~~
kxs
[https://github.com/kks32/phd-thesis-
template/blob/master/the...](https://github.com/kks32/phd-thesis-
template/blob/master/thesis.pdf)

------
cies
A quick look on Github told me you are not using the memoir package for this.
Could the author please elaborate why it is not using memoir?

~~~
bhaak
Because he's using scrreprt from KOMAscript as base class.

~~~
cies
Ah, thanks.

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richerlariviere
LaTeX rule them all when it's time to write a thesis. This template is nice.
The code is simple so a beginner can start to play with at any moment. Keep
working hard I love what you did.

------
boothead
Anyone got a similar resource for self publishing ebooks? I had some stuff
hacked together with org-mode and some other bits a while ago, but would like
to know of anything better.

~~~
ivan_ah
You can look into softcover/polytexnic here:
[https://github.com/softcover/softcover](https://github.com/softcover/softcover)
, I believe it had a decent .tex style for a book. Also very powerful pipeline
for producing .epub/.mobi from .tex

Another excellent style sheet to look into is the Tufre-style book:
[http://www.latextemplates.com/template/tufte-style-
book](http://www.latextemplates.com/template/tufte-style-book)

I'd also be happy to share some of the .tex header I use for my book---just
some customizations on the vanilla book documentclass. It's fairly hacky
stuff, but it works ;)

~~~
boothead
Softcover looks awesome. Thanks!

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Ftuuky
My university dictates the style of a thesis so no chance there but it looks
good.

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kanusterkund
That's thesis style infinity out of infinity +1. Nothing special, weird fonts,
lots of wasted space.

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kanusterkund
That's just thesis style infinity + 1, nothing special, a lot of wasted space
due to huge numbers.

~~~
brianobush
wasted space = more pages!

