briandealwis / ubcdiss

A LaTeX template for dissertations at the University of British Columbia

ubcdiss – a dissertation template for LaTeX

This distribution provides a community-maintained LaTeX template for writing a dissertation that conforms with UBC Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (GPS) specifications.

This template provides a document class builds on top of the standard LaTeX book class to ensure much better compatibility with standard LaTeX packages. The functionality is implemented using the commonly available packages found in most LaTeX distributions such as MacTeX, MikTeX, and TeXLive. (Give thanks to the countless volunteers who write and maintain these many TeX packages!)

The template has some documentation in doc.pdf. This documentation is itself written using the template, and the content is found in ack.tex, glossary.tex, and intro.tex. diss.tex is the main file but all the content is contained in the other files which are included from diss.tex using \include.

You will almost certainly need to use additional LaTeX packages for your dissertation. There are some pointers in diss.tex and doc.pdf to useful packages for handling common problems/requirements. You may need to manually install these for your distribution; teTeX in particular seems to ship with a much smaller package base.

GPS has very strict formatting requirements, and these requirements may change. You should review the GPS Thesis Specifications and Formatting Requirements. GPS is very lenient with font choice providing the fonts are used consistently. Please open an issue if GPS requires you to make formatting or organization changes: I'll fold those changes into the template for future students.

Please report problems with the template by opening an issue on Github. Before reporting a problem, please ensure that:

1. you have the latest version of the template (see the abstract in doc.pdf),
2. you are using the latest version of your TeX distribution,
3. your question isn't answered in the FAQ file, and
4. you've exhausted your local LaTeX wizard's help. Tip: You can often find your own wizard by buying beer for a CS grad at Koerner's.

When reporting a problem BE SURE TO INCLUDE:

1. the version used of this template
2. details on the operating system and TeX distribution you are using (e.g., Windows XP and MikTeX 2.5, SuSE Linux 10 and its bundled installation, MacOS X 10.5.4 and MacTeX 2007),
3. the log file (likely called diss.log).

ubcdiss's Issues

GPS now requires a Committee page

Hello,
As per
https://www.grad.ubc.ca/current-students/dissertation-thesis-preparation/preliminary-pages
a committee page must appear before abstract and be page ii. Could you please add that to the template?

Thanks

Comma missing after linktocpage

ubcdiss/diss.tex

Line 244 in f6515be

pagebackref,linktocpage%

That's it. Other than that, great package, thanks for maintaining!

Captions

How do we update the captions in List of Figures from showing a long text describing the image but only a short title? I tried this and this but it didn't work out. I will appreciate your timely help as I work towards a deadline.

pdf file has different outputs when compiling on Linux vs Windows

Hi Brian,

Thanks for providing such a useful repo. I recently had someone talking about how he could not compile the diss.tex file properly in his Windows 10 environment albeit I did not notice anything wrong in my Ubuntu environment. Upon further inspection, it seems that there are some font differences on Windows and the acronym package. There are some other differences but I can't reproduce them right now.

Has anyone noticed this before? If so, are you aware of potential differences between operating systems?

Cheers

Update stale/deprecated LaTeX packages

Thank you for your effort in maintaining this document template.

It's worth noting that some packages appearing in the template are now out-dated and superseded by newer packages. For example, it is my understanding that subcaption supersedes subfig and that the latter should not be used. Similarly, I believe that one of the packages for the Times typeface has also been superseded by a newer package.

I don't have time to submit a PR right now, but I will revisit this later if someone doesn't beat me to it first.

Should version.tex be included in the repository?

Should version.tex be included in the repository? By default abstract.tex tries to \input it.

Do the margins need to be set, or should they be included in the cls file?

Hi Brian,
First, thanks for creating and maintaining this style. It is immensely helpful to everyone who wants to use LaTeX for their theses.

The issue I'm having is that the margins are all wrong in the example document that you provide with the package (diss.tex). I've uploaded a copy of the output to: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hoqfb6oedjsl66v/diss.pdf and you can see that the margins are very large, not the 1" margins recommended by UBC FoGS.

I know that the margins on 8.5x11 inch pages are typically pretty wide in a default LaTeX document (a very good explanation is given at:
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/71172/why-are-default-latex-margins-so-big),
and I can fix the issue by putting the command
\usepackage[margin=1in]{geometry}
in the preamble, but I was wondering if this should be set in the cls file.

I'm using TeXLive (2012.20120611-4) on an Ubuntu 12.10 computer.

just FYI the website in the GitHub description (http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~bsd/ubcdiss/) is 404

Biblatex version?

Hi,
Thank you for creating this! Any chance you'd consider making a version that uses biblatex instead of natbib? I can't get the existing diss.tex (Latest commit 30f8e70 on Oct 4, 2019) to work with Windows 10, MikTek 2.9, and natbib has some limitations.
Thanks!