A LaTeX template for UCI dissertations
Like most universities, UCI has a strict set of rules for formatting and typesetting doctoral dissertations. The rules fall into the usual categories of margin, typeface, and layout guidelines, as well as some unique requirements for copyright declarations, the signature page, a curriculum vitae, and so on. A complete list is provided in the UCI Thesis and Dissertation Manual.
With so many requirements in this 43-page manual, starting out on the first draft of a dissertation can be rather daunting for Ph.D. students, especially since improper formatting could get the manuscript rejected by the University Archives. A word processor template would virtually eliminate this problem, but according to the AGS website, UCI provides no officially-sanctioned template for dissertations. Each student must format their manuscript from scratch, leading to duplicated effort and wasted time.
A few enterprising students have responded to this problem by creating unofficial UCI dissertation templates. They are designed specifically for LaTeX, a document preparation system favored by EECS and ICS grad students for its computer language affinity, extensive support for mathematical equations, and high-quality typesetting. By starting off with such a template as the foundation, writing a UCI dissertation essentially becomes a fill-in-blank process as LaTeX takes care of the table of contents, list of figures, and other formatting details automatically.
Xianping Ge created the first such template in 2002. It was later refined by Jeffery von Ronne and is now available on Vivek Haldar’s blog. Working separately, I started with Xianping’s original template and made my own set of clean-ups and enhancements with help from Mark Panahi. It improves upon Jeffrey’s version by adding a CV template, extensive comments to help the Ph.D. student fill-in and customize the template, and various minor fixes. In addition, I reviewed every aspect of the template to make sure that its output conforms to the Dissertation Manual as closely as possible.
The template can be downloaded by following the link below, which leads to a ZIP file containing the template, its LaTeX class file, a makefile for generating a PDF of the dissertation, a sample bibliography, and a “readme” file with more details on how to use the template. The link will be updated as new versions of the template become available.
LaTeX template for UCI dissertations
Last updated: August 16, 2008
February 12th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
[...] figure labels, citations, table of contents, and bibliography. Even better still, thanks to a couple of people, I have access to a University of California Irvine LaTeX thesis [...]
April 14th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Thanks for making your template available online! I just had a suggestion: long chapter titles appear as one line in the table of contents, and in your readme you suggested using a shorter caption. I looked online, and found a way to break up lines in the table of contents: use the “breaklinks” option for the hyperref package. Since you already have a line for the hyperref package, this becomes:
\usepackage[plainpages=false, breaklinks=true]{hyperref}
April 14th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
CF, I’m not seeing any problems with long chapter titles. LaTeX simply wraps them, so I don’t think the breaklinks option is applicable in this case. The problem I was referring to in the readme was regarding long figure and table captions, not chapter titles. If you tend to get wordy with your captions, the list of tables and figures gets messy. The alternate short caption was simply a workaround for this. I’ve reworded the readme to clarify this point.
April 16th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
I had a problem with my chapter titles (which are titles of papers in my case) not being wrapped in the table of contents, so I found the breaklinks option useful. Haven’t had any problems with tables and figures - no long titles there.
Thanks again!
August 6th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
I see you’re getting out of here, congrats! You may have heard this from the archivist yourself, but generally there’s supposed to be a “Page” above the listing of pages in the TOC, LOF and LOT. Whoever may be taking care of this template (which is great, by the way!) may want to add:
\addtocontents{toc}{\protect\raggedleft Page\\}
\addtocontents{lof}{\protect\raggedleft Page\\}
\addtocontents{lot}{\protect\raggedleft Page\\}
in the appropriate places.
August 15th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Brett, thanks for catching that. Personally I think the column title is redundant information—it’s obvious that the numbers are page numbers. But since the official manual has it, then the template should, too. I’ve uploaded a new version of the template that includes your fix.