McMaster Thesis Template

A thesis template for McMaster students.

System Requirements

You will need to install:

• a working LaTeX installation,
• Pygments, and
• InkScape.

Please run make system_requirements for an up-to-date list of system requirements for building the report.

Build

Before building, please ensure that you have the related system requirements installed. Everything related to building the thesis report is contained in the Makefile. To build it, you can run make build in your shell, and it will create a build/ folder locally, containing the desired final thesis.pdf file.

If you're building for printing, please edit the compilingforprinting option in the manifest.tex configuration file and rebuild the document.

Debugging

make build runs fast because it runs without interactivity. To run the TeX build interactively, please run make debug instead of make build when building your thesis. This will allow you to debug any visual artifacts found in your PDF, or the lack thereof.

Configuration

Please view manifest.tex for information about configuring the build.

Source Code Organization

Personally, I tend to prefer “just text” in my TeX files, importing cluttering code (such as that in tables, figures, etc.) from external files. This helps me quickly find and edit my assets. However, you should not restrict yourself to my preferences. Please feel free to use my general schema, or not. In particular, I've divided up my chapters into a separate file for each, my front matter into separate files, and each of my “assets” into a separate folder and file as required.

thesis.tex is the main TeX file, importing all other things. In particular, it imports:

• metadata from manifest.tex,
• bib references from references.bib,
• external assets (such as images, figures, tables) from assets.tex,
• chapter information from front.tex, chapters.tex, and back.tex, all respectively for the front, main, and back matters,
• helpful macros you might build for yourself, or that I found particularly, useful when building my thesis, from macros.tex, and
• the McMaster University colour swatch from mcmaster_colours.tex.

You should be mindful of all of these above listed files. Each one will have its own discussion of its usage in its respective header, but you are free to ignore the general schema I've built, or to modify it to your liking.

Credits

Please note that I built this template using publicly available resources, such as Overleaf, LaTeX Wikibooks, as well as many works by individuals (for both inspiration and code snippets), in no particular order:

• Benjamin Furman's McMaster Thesis Example based on Steven Gunn and Sunil Patel's work.
• Geneva Smith's McMaster thesis template.
• Clemens Niederberger for this public StackOverflow response.
• Arash Esbati for this public StackOverflow response.
• Gabriel Devenyi's McMaster Thesis LaTeX, specifically for the bibliography code.
• "tom" from TeXBlog.

If you feel you should be added to this list, please feel free to open a ticket or email me, and I will add you as soon as I can.