I have begun the initial steps of preparing my 4^th year undergraduate thesis. I have chosen to write my thesis in LaTeX2e because of the simplicity of writing large amounts of mathematical equations as well as the superior layout capabilities offered by the TeX typesetting system.

This leaves two problems. The first is “how should my thesis look, anyway?” I have never written one before, and only have my hands on a couple (all but one of which are from another institution altogether). Do you number pages and sections? How do you label equations and figures? The second problem, as you know if you have ever worked with LaTeX, is that once I determine how the document should look, it can take a great deal of work to set it up to render that way.

Along comes Francois Pitt, a computer science lecturer at the University of Toronto. Francois has generously released a LaTeX class file for formatting documents according to the School of Graduate Studies‘ Guidelines for the Preparation of Theses. You can download the class file and a sample LaTeX document here.

Update

Heh. I’ve already run into some stuff about the class file I want to change. Perhaps when I’m done I’ll upload a revised copy of the style. Anyway, thesis outline, ho!

Update 2

It seems that this past year, ut-thesis has been added to the SGS website as the preferred thesis template. I somewhat wish I had gotten around to submitting my revised class file before that happened =(