ua-thesis-template

A thesis LaTeX template that complies with the University of Aveiro's guidelines and provides a simple CLI workflow around make that was developed and tested for cross-compatibility on Linux (Slackware, ArchLinux) and macOS (High Sierra 10.13.6).

Usage

Build a development version of the document:

make [build]

Continuously build the development version of the document:

make preview

This option is great when paired with a document viewer (such as Okular) which automatically reloads the document on file change. This means you can keep writing and on save the updated document is compiled and displayed!

Build versions of the document for publishing:

make print
make ebook

Run linters (for now only proselint) against a TeX file (e.g. chapter 1):

make lint [texfile=chapter1.tex]

If you do not specify the texfile to lint, then all TeX files in chapters/ will be linted.

Clean the build directory:

make clean[all]

clean will leave the output products (the PDFs) in place, while cleanall will remove these too. If your document is not compiling for some reason and you think you've already solved the problem in the LaTeX sources, maybe try a cleanall before insisting. Sometimes the underlying build programs (namely latexmk) get stuck in inconsistent temporary files.

How to use the template

This is all great, but how can this repository be used as a starting point for writing your own thesis?

In our opinion you have mostly three options:

• Download/clone the repository and copy all files to a directory of your desire, for instance to inside some special folder within you own thesis repository.
  Notice that this will not allow you to easily keep up with this template should it change.
• Fork the repository to your own and work there. If you want to include it within your own thesis repository, you can use git submodules for this.
• Use git subtree to pull this repository to your main thesis repository and work directly there. Changes in your copy will be versioned by your main thesis repo, while you will still be able to pull new updates from here should they appear.

I've chosen the last of these options, as it seems to be the most flexible and easy-to-use alternative. Here follow the main commands you will need should you choose to go along with this too.

$ git subtree add  --prefix $DESTDIR [email protected]:fabiomaia/ua-thesis-template.git master --squash;
$ git subtree pull --prefix $DESTDIR [email protected]:fabiomaia/ua-thesis-template.git master --squash;

They should be self explanatory, but:

• The first of these will pull this repository for the first time to $DESTDIR.
• The second is used for subsequent pulls.

This assumes that you are within an already initialized git repo. Look for more on the documentation.

Dependencies

• A TeX distribution: TeX Live or MacTeX
• gs (for make print, make ebook and simplify-colors.sh)
• imagemagick and poppler (for simplify-colors.sh)
• pygments (for minted)

Authors

Tomás Oliveira e Silva created the original template which was later picked up by João Paulo Barraca who improved and maintained it for years.

This is a fork by Fábio Maia and Ricardo Jesus who wanted to further improve the template and setup a clean environment and workflow for writing their MSc thesis.