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PhD Thesis Template

School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University

This was created by Andrew Moore and Alistair Baron with help from Paul Rayson, and Edward Dearden.

Heavily based on the formatting and content of:

Conforms with Lancaster University Manual of Academic Regulations and Procedures (MARP) 2020-21 for Postgraduate Research. For layout information the most relevant pages of that document are pages 30 and 31 (Appendix 2).

Please check that your thesis complies with the current regulations. If not available from the above link, details will be on the SCC PGR Moodle space.

If you have any useful updates for this template, which you think will benefit others, please make these available via github, with a pull request.

Also available as an Overleaf template

Compile using Docker image

NOTE Currently the docker file does not work with Windows.

To compile this on your home computer using Docker:

  1. Build the docker image:
    1. For Linux (Tested and works) run the following: bash linux-docker-build.sh the full docker image downloaded to your computer will be called scc-lancaster/tex-live:0.0.1. NOTE as we will be sharing files between your home machine and docker we set the user on the docker build as the user on your home machine by setting the uid and gid in the docker image as id -u and id -g.
  2. Once the docker image is built you can just compile the latex using the following command: bash docker-compile.sh. The PDF output should be found at main.pdf

The docker-compile.sh file starts the scc-lancaster/tex-live:0.0.1 docker image and runs the following bash script compile_latex.sh which calls pdflatex, biber, pdflatex, pdflatex and then performs some cleanup.

Docker image is large -- this docker image is rather large ~4.79GB. To delete the docker image run docker rmi scc-lancaster/tex-live:0.0.1 and then you may need to perform docker system prune

Useful guides/advice

  1. Some tips to speed up latex compiling by overleaf (NOTE some of these tips are overleaf specific), the top tip is to not use image formats like PNG or JPEG but rather PDFs (PDF's also render and scale better).
  2. The microtype package (\usepackage{microtype}) helps with removing some overfull or underfull box warnings.
  3. This current template discourages hyphenated words at end of lines through \hyphenpenalty=5000 \tolerance=1000 which are on lines 48 and 50 of main.tex. This was done to make the thesis easier to read.
  4. If you have a header that is a multi line header it may require you to change the \setlength{\headheight} within ./main.tex, for more information see the comments within ./main.tex under the title of HEADER AND FOOTER STYLE.
  5. You could have both headers in the center instead of one on the left and one on the right by changing the LE and R0 to CE and CO, in the following code that is within ./main.tex:
\fancyhead[LE]{\textit{ \nouppercase{\leftmark}} }
\fancyhead[RO]{\textit{ \nouppercase{\rightmark}} }

Specifying a date rather than \today

When submitting your thesis you may want to specify the date you submitted it for your viva rather than the date you submit it to pure/after corrections. To do so you can create a submission date like so, this example will show a submission date of July 2020:

\newdate{submissiondate}{01}{07}{2020}

This should go underneath in ./main.tex

\usepackage{datetime}
\newdateformat{monthyeardate}{%
  \monthname[\THEMONTH], \THEYEAR}
% \newdate{submissiondate}{01}{07}{2020}

Then we need to change the \today date in ./title_page.tex and ./abstract.tex to:

\monthyeardate{\displaydate{submissiondate}}

Docker files

We have added the following docker files:

  1. Dockerfile -- builds a custom docker image based on the latest TexLive docker image. This sets the timezone to London, UK, install inkscape so that SVG files can be compiled in the LaTex build process, and creates a new user latex so that permissions between your home machine and the docker machine are the same.
  2. linux-docker-build.sh -- builds the docker image for linux, we use the commands id -u and id -g to find your user's id and group id. The user and group id is required so that the docker image and your home machine can share files. Tested and works.
  3. docker-compile.sh -- after building the docker image use this bash script to compile your latex. This just runs the compile_latex.sh file in the newly build docker image.