uni-stuttgart-phdthesis-template

This is an unofficial LuaL^AT_EX template for PhD theses by and for members of the University of Stuttgart, Germany, following the university's regulations for PhD theses (Promotionsordnung).

The template is private work by members of the University of Stuttgart. It is not endorsed by the University of Stuttgart or any of its institutions, institutes, or departments. The template is made available to the public as we think it might be useful for other people. Neither the authors nor the University of Stuttgart provide support for the template going beyond this README.

The license for the template is located in LICENSE.

If you happen to improve the template, it would be nice if you merged back your work using pull requests.

Features

You can download a compiled sample PDF located in out/thesisManuscriptScreen.pdf.

• Improved typographic style with KOMA-Script and microtype
• Draft mode: Line numbers, Git commit and compile date as watermark, highlighting of overfull hboxes and hyphenation places
• Filtering of LuaL^AT_EX via custom blacklist
• Output to-do notes as warnings to the log file to stay on track
• Consistent figure, sub-figure, algorithm, and theorem style
• Bibliography and glossary
• Automatic generation of graphics with SCons and Matplotlib, figures are only recompiled if the PGF code changed

Requirements

• T_EX distribution with LuaL^AT_EX, Biber, Makeglossaries, makeindex, texfot, and PDFCROP (tested with TeXLive 2017)
• Python 3.x with Matplotlib, NumPy, SciPy
• SCons
• Git

Usage

Type scons in the root directory of the project to compile the template. The PDF will be placed in build/pdf/ and copied to out/. Type scons -c to clean up.

There several modes that can be activated or deactivated in tex/switches.tex:

• Draft mode: This shows line numbers and a draft watermark on every page. When deactivated, this overrides the settings for debug and check modes and deactivates them.
• Check mode: This highlights all overfull hboxes with a black bar near the box. All places where a word was hyphenated due to line wrapping are also highlighted with a black bar. Additionally, the hyphenated words are written to the end of the log file build/tex/thesis.log. To whitelist the hyphenation of a word, add it to hyphenation_whitelist.txt (one word per line, all lowercase, with hyphens where hypenation is allowed).
• Debug mode: This shows all boxes, glues, and kerning info.
• Partial compile mode: This allows to select individual chapters to speed up the compilation process. After enabling this mode, turn on the respective compileChapterX toggle to only compile that chapter (without appendices, table of contents, glossary, and bibliography).

By default, the draft and the check mode are activated.

On the back of the title page, versioning information is printed (and also on every page, if the draft mode is activated). This info includes compile time, Git commit time, and the Git commit hash (with an asterisk if the working directiory is "dirty"). It is printed by calling Git from a Lua script. If you don't want to manage your thesis in a Git repository (you do, trust me), then you might have to change some files. Search for "git" in the tex/*.tex files to know where you have to change something.

Additionally, the versioning info includes a compile counter. The counter increases on each compile by 1 and is located in the file compile_counter.txt. Removing it should be very easy, if you don't want this.

Caveats

• There are some problems with Windows. Calling external processes (io.popen) does not seem to work, which means that the version info won't be printed.
• The glossary has to be re-generated for every SCons call. Otherwise, it may happen that a change in the description of a glossary entry won't be reflected in the glossary itself.