University of Aveiro Thesis Template

A thesis LaTeX template that complies with the University of Aveiro's guidelines and provides a simple CLI workflow around make that was developed and tested for cross-compatibility on Linux (Slackware, ArchLinux, Debian, Ubuntu) and macOS.

This template was developed by professors and students. We will try to keep up to date with thesis requirements but some discrepancies may exist. Feel free to open issues and pull requests with new options, packages and fixes.

Usage

Optional: In debian and ubuntu you can install all dependencies automatically:

make setup

Build a development version of the document:

make [build]

Continuously build the development version of the document:

make preview

This option is great when paired with a document viewer (such as Okular) which automatically reloads the document on file change. This means you can keep writing and on save the updated document is compiled and displayed!

Build versions of the document for publishing:

make print
make ebook

Run linters (for now only proselint) against a TeX file (e.g. chapter 1):

make lint [texfile=chapter1.tex]

If you do not specify the texfile to lint, then all TeX files in chapters/ will be linted.

Clean the build directory:

make clean[all]

clean will leave the output products (the PDFs) in place, while cleanall will remove these too. If your document is not compiling for some reason and you think you've already solved the problem in the LaTeX sources, maybe try a cleanall before insisting. Sometimes the underlying build programs (namely latexmk) get stuck in inconsistent temporary files.

How to use the template

This is all great, but how can this repository be used as a starting point for writing your own thesis?

In our opinion you have mostly three options:

• Download/clone the repository and copy all files to a directory of your desire, for instance to inside some special folder within you own thesis repository.
  Notice that this will not allow you to easily keep up with this template should it change.
• Fork the repository to your own and work there. If you want to include it within your own thesis repository, you can use git submodules for this.
• Use git subtree to pull this repository to your main thesis repository and work directly there. Changes in your copy will be versioned by your main thesis repo, while you will still be able to pull new updates from here should they appear.

The last of these options mas be the most adquate, as it seems to be the most flexible and easy-to-use alternative. Here follow the main commands you will need should you choose to go along with this too.

$ mkdir mythesis
$ git init .
$ git commit --allow-empty -n -m "Initial commit."
$ git subtree add  --prefix document https://github.com/detiuaveiro/ua-thesis-template.git master --squash;
$ git subtree pull --prefix document https://github.com/detiuaveiro/ua-thesis-template.git master --squash;

• The first line will init a new repository for your thesis
• It will create an initial commit
• It will pull this repository for the first time to document
• The second is used for subsequent pulls.

The result should be a git repository for your thesis work. In the $DESTDIR (e.g. document) you will have the document to edit. If you wish you can add a reference to another git repository to track your own changes.

Use as a template in github

Please check the github instructions to create your own repository using this as a template.

Use it in Overleaf

It is possible to use this template in overleaf.

To enable it:

• in matter.tex change \def\useoverleaf{0}to 1
• add fc-portuges.def to the project the file be can found in here
• change the main document to matter.tex

Dependencies

• A TeX distribution: TeX Live or MacTeX
• gs (for make print, make ebook and simplify-colors.sh)
• pandoc (for make lint)
• imagemagick and poppler (for simplify-colors.sh)
• pygments (for minted)

As for pygments and proselint, those can by installed with pip by issuing pip install -r requirements.txt at the root of this repository.

On Ubuntu relatives the following dependencies, installable with apt may also be required

• biber
• texlive-bibtex-extra
• texlive-latex-extra
• texlive-science

These endorsed dependencies which may or may not come with the TeX Live package distributed with your Linux distribution.

Usually TeX Live is split into a minimal package and a texlive-extra which is filled with the remainder of TeX Live, be it fonts, styles, language support, and so on. So, if a LaTeX dependency is missing on your installation, do verify that you are not missing one of these packages.

Authors

Tomás Oliveira e Silva created the original template which was later picked up by João Paulo Barraca who improved and maintained it for years.

This is a fork by Fábio Maia and Ricardo Jesus who wanted to further improve the template and setup a clean environment and workflow for writing their MSc thesis.