Add support to `\part{Part Title}`

[ZeyuSun]

It is common that a thesis has many sections and the author may want to group related chapters into parts. For example: https://aigen.github.io/files/thesis.pdf https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/35782/how-to-split-a-latex-document-using-parts-and-chapters

However, it seems this template does not currently support \part level sectioning. In main.tex, I added two lines to break the content into two parts:

%% DOCUMENT AREA
\begin{document}

\part{Intro}
\input{chapters/example_chapter_01}
% Place your additional chapters here using the \input{} command

\part{Methodology}
\input{chapters/example_chapter_99}

This results in an error: LaTeX Error: Something's wrong--perhaps a missing \item. in .\output.toc at line 11, with the message:

l.11 ...ine {part}{I\hspace {1em}Intro}{1}{part.1}
                                                  %
Try typing  <return>  to proceed.
If that doesn't work, type  X <return>  to quit.

The table of contents of the resulting PDF is messed up:

[meluso]

Hi ZeyuSun, thanks for reaching out. I'm open to considering this feature, though there are a few things we'd need to address before doing so.

1. Does U-M allow dissertations to have "parts" (specifically) in addition to chapters? To date, I've only seen U-M dissertations use chapters, sections, subsections, etc. That doesn't mean it couldn't have them -- the handbook doesn't say either way -- but it hasn't been common to U-M dissertations to date. Each university has specific formatting requirements for dissertations, so I wouldn't recommend referencing a CMU dissertation for what we "should" do here. So if you decide this is really important to you, please confirm with ScholarSpace that you can do this for your dissertation.
2. If it's allowed, I'd encourage you to fork the template and see if you can find a way to update thesis-umich.cls so that the table of contents and the beginning of chapters are correct. Rackham is very picky about how chapters are labeled in dissertations, so we need to make sure we don't break the template for other students.
3. If you find a way to make this work -- and that doesn't affect the formatting for those who don't want to use parts in their dissertations -- we can absolutely look at integrating it into the template! The goal is to make this as flexible as we can while still ensuring that most people have a seamless experience with their latex dissertations. That's already a tall order, so I do what I can with this template.

Let me know if you have thoughts or questions and we'll go from there! Thanks!

[ZeyuSun]

Yes you are right, I don't see "parts" in UM thesis template and handbook. For my thesis, part-level sectioning is a nice feature but not necessary, so I think we can leave it for now. Thank you for considering this!