1. Suitable Page Set-Up Preamble up for MPhil and PhD Thesis
2. Instructions to Make Centred, Capitalised Chapter Headings in LaTeX
3. Double-spacing
4. Removing Page Numbers
5. A Skeleton LaTeX file for a Thesis

Thesis which have to be bound should have certain criteria satisfied in terms of margins and pagination, partly so that when they are bound they are still readable. The first guideline is that they be single sided only. The rules about margins are then; left hand margin >= 3cm, top and bottom margins ~3cm, and right hand margin ~2cm. The following latex preamble gets it roughly correct.

\topmargin-0.5cm
\footskip1cm
\oddsidemargin0.5cm
\evensidemargin0cm
\textwidth16cm
\textheight22cm

The thesis should be on a4 paper, and it is suggested that the font be 12pt. Hence a suitable documentclass statement is

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{report}

Firstly, download the titlesec.tar.gz package directly into the directory where you have the LaTeX files for your thesis. (Do not put save them into a subdirectory.)

Unzip it using the command:

gunzip titlesec.tar.gz

Un-tar it using the command:

tar -xvf titlesec.tar

This will create all the files which belong to the titlesec.sty package. This includes the instruction manual; this is called titlesec.tex and it must be LaTeXed to create the .dvi file which may then be read. You may now delete the file titlesec.tar.

In your LaTeX document, add the line:

\usepackage[compact]{titlesec}

before your \begin{document} command.

Finally, add the line:

\titleformat{\chapter}[display]{\filcenter\sc\Huge}{\chaptertitlename\,\,\thechapter}{0pt}{}{}

after your \usepackage commands.

LaTeX your document a few times and then bask in the satisfaction of getting LaTeX to do something right for a change (perhaps!).

It is suggested that the best and clearest way of presenting your work is to double-space it. There are lots of ways to do this but the best way I found was to use the doublespace package, which is already installed on babbage/fourier. Just add the line

\usepackage{doublespace}

before your \begin{document} statement. This will then automatically double-space your entire document, with the exception of captions for figures, tables etc. If you wish to have a portion of your document which is single-spaced, for example a table or a matrix, just put:

\begin{singlespace}

before the bit you want single-spaced, and:

\end{singlespace}

immediately afterwards.

Another rule is that the page numbering should begin on the first page of the main body of your thesis, i.e. the table of contents and list of figures should not be numbered. This is quite tricky to achieve, especially if your table of contents runs to more than one page, but the following commands seem to work.

Firstly, put the command:

\pagestyle{empty}

after the \begin{document} statement but before your title page. This tells LaTeX that you don't want any numbers on your pages. Unfortunately, LaTeX seems to ignore this command occasionally so you also need to put:

\tableofcontents
\thispagestyle{empty}
\addtocontents{toc}{\protect\thispagestyle{empty}}
\listoffigures
\thispagestyle{empty}
\addtocontents{lof}{\protect\thispagestyle{empty}}
\thispagestyle{empty}

You may need to include some extra \thispagestyle{empty} commands; experiment to find out where to place them and how many you need. In the example above, the table of contents was two pages long but the list of figures was three. Finally, you need to tell LaTeX that you want the rest of your document to be numbered so include the line:

\pagestyle{plain}

just before the main body of your text.

N.B. This will not start the numbering off at 1; the un-numbered pages are still counted, it's just that the numbers are not displayed. If you wish for the main body to begin on page 1, you need to write:

\pagenumbering{arabic}

immediately before the LaTeX of your first page; for example, just before the \chapter command. If you are using \include{filename} commands, you must put this command at the top of the first actual file, NOT in your main document before the \include commands.