Thesis in a Box. Mark Andrew Paskin. B.A. Hon. (Cornell University) 1998 M.S. (University of California, Berkeley) 2000

Transcription

1 Thesis in a Box by Mark Andrew Paskin B.A. Hon. (Cornell University) 1998 M.S. (University of California, Berkeley) 2000 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Committee in charge: Professor Moe Howard, Chair Professor Curly Howard Professor Larry Pine Fall 2004

2 The dissertation of Mark Andrew Paskin is approved: Professor Moe Howard, Chair Date Professor Curly Howard Date Professor Larry Pine Date University of California, Berkeley Fall 2004

3 Thesis in a Box Copyright c 2004 by Mark Andrew Paskin

4 Abstract Thesis in a Box by Mark Andrew Paskin Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science University of California, Berkeley Professor Moe Howard, Chair Thesis in a Box is a framework for easily using L A TEX to create a PDF doctoral dissertation that obeys the formatting requirements of the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Moe Howard, Chair Date 1

5 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Kevin Murphy, who inspired (and contributed to) this project by publishing the L A TEX source of his dissertation [Murphy, 2002]. i

6 Dedicated to the Open Source Movement ii

7 Contents 1 Introduction What is Thesis in a Box? Why use PDF instead of PostScript? Contributions Outline of this thesis Appendix 1.A How to make an appendix Files 5 3 Compiling your thesis 7 4 Conclusion Contributions of this thesis Directions for future research Bibliography 9 iii

8 Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 What is Thesis in a Box? Thesis in a Box is a L A TEX framework for formatting a PDF doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley Why use PDF instead of PostScript? PDF has several advantages over PostScript: in many cases it is more compact; more people have PDF readers than PostScript readers; and, PDF readers have more functionality like hyperlinking and annotation. Thesis in a Box uses the hyperref package and compiles your L A TEX source directly to PDF. This gives your thesis several nice features, which are described below. 1 I hope it will be useful to students filing at other schools, but the format may need to be changed to satisfy other school s requirements. 1

9 Chapter 1. Introduction Bookmarks The first advantage is that, using Adobe Acrobat, the readers of your thesis can quickly navigate the chapters and sections of your thesis using the bookmark window. If you are viewing this document in Adobe Acrobat, look on the left hand side and you will see that you can quickly navigate through this document Hyperlinking The second advantage is that the following types of references are automatically hyperlinked: chapter and section references, including those in the table of contents (e.g., go to Chapter 2) equation references (e.g., check out (4.1)) citations (e.g., this document is [Paskin, 2003]) index references (e.g., this boldface item is indexed as item check the index at the back) Annotation PDF files support reader annotation, which can a useful way for your thesis committee to comment on drafts Graphics Because your thesis is compiled directly to PDF, all graphics you include must be in PDF format. Thesis in a Box includes the package graphicx, so you can use the \includegraphics command to include PDF graphics directly into your thesis. If 2

10 Chapter 1. Introduction Figure 1.1: A figure. This caption is typeset in sans serif font to distinguish it from body text; you can turn this off if you like. you have used EPS graphics in the past, they can be converted to PDF format using the Unix utility epstopdf. An example is given in Figure Contributions Thesis in a Box is useful for a number of reasons. First, it implements the strict formatting requirements of the University of California, Berkeley. Second, it gives you easy examples of how to do things in L A TEX that you might not have done before, like citations, indexing, tables of contents, etc. Finally, Thesis in a Box comes with a Makefile which makes it really easy to compile your thesis. 1.4 Outline of this thesis The rest of this document is structured as follows: In Chapter 2 we describe the files in the distribution, and what you should (and should not) change to write your thesis. In Chapter 3 we describe how to compile the L A TEX thesis into PDF. For a quick start, you can compile this document by typing make. 3

11 Chapter 1. Introduction Appendix 1.A How to make an appendix Using the appendix package, you can place appendices at the end of chapters rather than at the end of the thesis. This can make your chapters more self-contained. 4

12 Chapter 2 Files Thesis in a Box consists of a set of files, some of which you will change, and others which you will not. You will change the following files: frontmatter.sty, which customizes the information in the front matter (e.g., thesis title, your name, etc.) abstract.tex, the L A TEX source of your abstract acknowledgements.tex, the L A TEX source of your acknowledgements commands.tex, the L A TEX source of all the extra commands you want included in the document, like package includes and command definitions content.tex, the L A TEX source of your thesis thesis.bib, the BibTEX file containing your bibliography information Do not change the following files, unless you know what you re doing: thesis.tex, the L A TEX file that collects together several L A TEX files to form your complete thesis 5

13 Chapter 2. Files frontmatter.tex, the L A TEX source of the front matter, including the title page, table of contents, etc. hyperref.cfg, which customizes the PDF translation named.sty and named.bst, which implement the named BibTEX style Makefile, which allows you to compile your thesis easily using make 6

14 Chapter 3 Compiling your thesis The Makefile distributed with Thesis in a Box has been designed to perform the following functions if and when they are needed: Compiling the sources using pdflatex Creating the bibliography using bibtex Creating the index using makeindex It is also sensitive to when L A TEX must be run multiple times to resolve crossreferences. There are two commands that are useful: 1. make: this performs all of the tasks above, resulting in the PDF file 2. make clean: this removes the PDF file as well as any intermediate files made by the make process. It does not remove other files like E-macs ~ files. To view your thesis, you can use Acrobat Reader or another PDF viewer such as Apple Preview. While you are writing your thesis, I recommend using xpdf as a viewer, because you can quickly reload the PDF file to reflect editing changes by simply typing r. 7

15 Chapter 4 Conclusion 4.1 Contributions of this thesis Okay, so Thesis in a Box is not as impressive as Einstein s famous relation between matter and energy: E = mc 2 (4.1) But I hope it saves you some time. 4.2 Directions for future research If anyone sees a nice way to improve Thesis in a Box, please let me know (or better yet, do it and send me the result). 8

16 Bibliography [Murphy, 2002] Kevin Murphy. Dynamic Bayesian Networks: Representation, Inference and Learning. PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 387 Soda Hall, Berkeley CA 94720, July [Paskin, 2003] Mark A. Paskin. Thesis in a Box. University of California, Berkeley, 387 Soda Hall, Berkeley CA 94720, August

17 Index item, 2 10