IITM Thesis Template (LyX)

An exact LyX port of the standard IIT Madras BTech/MTech/MS/PhD Thesis format.

Installing LyX and Other Packages

For Linux:

The following packages need to be installed:

lyx
texlive
texlive-latexextra
texlive-publishers
texlive-science

Use a suitable package manager for your distribution.

For Windows:

Download and install the latest LyX bundle from this website: http://www.lyx.org/Download The same installer will also install MiKTeX on your computer.

After LyX and MiKTeX are installed, open MiKTeX Package Manager (Admin) from start menu. Go to Repository > Change Repository, let it pull the names from the internet, and choose any HTTP repository of your choice.

We now need to install three packages, caption, natbib and threeparttable from there. You can search using the Name field on the top bar. Then right click and choose Install on the shown package.

The procedure is not over just yet. Move on to the next section.

Copying the Layout & Class Files

The template should work on Windows as well as Linux. However, I recommend using Linux for this since it's much easier to configure there.

For Linux:

1. Download the zip file. Extract it somewhere. cd to the folder where you extracted it.

2. Copy the iitmdiss directory to the latex template directory. Note that on some distributions, path may be different.

   • For Archlinux: sudo cp -r iitmdiss /usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/latex/iitmdiss/.

   • For Ubuntu: sudo cp -r iitmdiss/ /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/iitmdiss

3. Copy iitmdiss.layout file to LyX layouts directory.

   sudo cp iitmdiss.layout /usr/share/lyx/layouts/

4. Run texhash to refresh file name database.

sudo texhash

5. Open LyX. Click on Tools > Reconfigure. Restart LyX when done.

For Windows:

1. Download the zip file and extract its contents somewhere.

2. Now copy the directory iitmdiss to %AppData%\MiKTeX\2.9\tex\latex. You may first need to create the latex directory inside %AppData%\MiKTeX\2.9\tex\ manually.

3. Now copy the file iitmdiss.layout inside C:\Program Files (x86)\LyX 2.1\Resources\layouts.

4. After this is done, open cmd.exe and type: texhash

5. Open LyX as administrator, and click on Tools>Reconfigure. Now restart Lyx, again as an admin.

That's it!

The template thesis.lyx should now open and compile properly.

You may get an error saying a class is missing, but ignore it since the PDF is created just fine. Test it by opening thesis.lyx and choosing File > Export > PDF (pdflatex). A new PDF with name thesis.pdf will be created in the same directory.

Usage Instructions

• First thing you should do is, open Document > Settings > LaTeX Preamble. Set the Thesis title, Author, Date and your Department name there.

• Set your degree in Documents > Settings > Document class > Custom. Values can be:

  • BTech
  • MTech
  • MS
  • PhD

• If it's a synopsis, add synopsis to the end. (Examples: MTech, synopsis or simply MTech)

• Don't remove any of the grey chunks of text you see in the file. Just edit the text part.

• Figures can be inserted normally through first Insert > Float > Figure and then Insert>Graphics inside it. Same with tables.

• This document supports all image formats (jpeg, png, eps, pdf etc). Set the image scaling via Right-click > Settings on the image.

• References at the end of the document can be set by editing the file refs.bib found in the same folder.

Exporting the PDF

Do File > Export > PDF (pdflatex). thesis.pdf will be created in the same folder.

Good luck! :)