Minithesis

A small thesis template and makefile.

This requires some standard latex software to be installed in your environment. I don't recall which exact packages are needed, so I wish you the best of luck.

Layout

Begin in main.tex; this is the core latex file from which you can follow the imports to all others.

Component tex files are in main/.

Figures are in figures/.

The bibliography file is bib.bib.

Build

Your thesis comes in several versions for different purposes:

• main.pdf is a draft without figures. Build it with make main.pdf, or just make.
• main.hard.pdf is the hard-bound version. Build it with make main.hard.pdf.
• main.soft.pdf is the soft-bound version. Build it with make main.soft.pdf.

To build all three in parallel, use make all -j.

Building the thesis produces many additional files, which we place into a directory named scratch/.

When you get cryptic errors, inspect the log files named scratch/main*.log; search these log files for 'error'-like keywords.

The build scripts in Makefile are tuned to minimize output noise and build time. For particularly stubborn bugs, consider using a standard pdflatex build that pipes less output to /dev/null.

Clean-up

Use make clean to remove stuff after builds.

Latexdiff

Latexdiff is a pain. See the comments in Makefile for a template that points it to diff against a previous version of your thesis, which should exist in a different directory.