Hagenberg Thesis Document Collection (LaTeX)

What You Find Here

This is a collection of modern LaTeX classes, style files, and example documents for authoring Bachelor, Master, or Diploma theses and related academic manuscripts in English and German. Pre-configured English and German documents are available, easy to use even for LaTeX beginners, and compatible with LaTeX distributions for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. The document classes are immediately usable and convenient to customize.

The main document, HgbThesisTutorialEN or HgbThesisTutorialDE, serves both as a template and tutorial for authoring a bachelor, master, or diploma thesis with LaTeX. Developed initially as an internal standard at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, this setup has become popular at several other (mostly German-speaking) institutions over the last few years.

This site is the main repository for the hagenberg-thesis package, which is also available on CTAN and shared by popular package repositories such as MikTeX and TexLive. Note that the most recent versions are always found here, while only periodic releases are submitted to CTAN.

How to Use

Checkout (Local LaTeX Installation)

To open a sample document on your computer, use the appropriate download (ZIP) link in the table below. Unzip the downloaded archive to a suitable location and open the main.tex file in your TeX editor. Make sure you have a current LaTeX environment installed.

Online Usage (Single-click Authoring)

The sample documents can also be edited in a web browser without installing LaTeX on your computer. Use the create links in the table below to open the document on Overleaf.

Sample Documents

Each sample document is based on a custom LaTeX document class (e.g., hgbthesis.cls) and various style files (hgb.sty, ...). The style files can also be used independently for other kinds of documents. The following sample documents (with numerical citations using numeric-comp) are currently available:

APA Style Documents

To use the APA 7th edition style for citations and references, the option apa can be used in the document's preamble. Two separate sample documents are already prepared for the use of the APA style:

*Note: A (free) account is required to open documents on Overleaf.

PDF/A Generation and Validation

All documents in this collection are set up to optionally create PDF/A-compliant output files (PDF/A-2b, to be exact). Note that while the original documents are indeed PDF/A-compliant, any derived document may not be so. It is, therefore, important to validate the resulting PDF file before submission using one of the options listed below. Most violations of the PDF/A standard arise from the inclusion of other PDF files, particularly graphics. Typical issues are related to using non-embedded fonts and incorrect or unwanted color spaces. This setup assumes sRGB colors, which should also be used when creating your own illustrations. Here are some PDF/A validation software and services:

• veraPDF: online validation service or downloadable validation client,
• pdf-online: online validation service.

Additional Features

The hagenberg-thesis classes and styles try to provide as much functionality out-of-the-box as possible while still being easy to use. Additional functionality that did not permanently find its way into the files is documented in the wiki for this repository.

Further Information

• Package manual
• Package on CTAN (hagenberg-thesis)
• Recent changes
• License
• Issues
• Discussions