kolesarm / harvard-gsas-thesis

A LaTeX class for publising a PhD thesis according to Harvard GSAS requirements

gsasthesis

LaTeX2e class for publishing a PhD thesis to comply with Harvard GSAS requirements

gsasthesis.cls modifies the appearance of the standard report class to satisfy the Harvard GSAS requirements, published at

http://www.gsas.harvard.edu/images/stories/pdfs/form%20of%20dissertation.pdf

Download

There are two options:

1. pull/clone directly from GitHub
2. download a zip archive of the latest version https://github.com/kolesarm/harvard-gsas-thesis/archive/master.zip

Usage

The file thesis.tex contains a sample thesis, from which and introduction and three sample thesis chapters and an appendix are included. It compiles with pdflatex to produce a sample thesis.pdf document. The .tex files contain a number of specific pointers that should help to adapt the sample file to your needs. Keep the class file, gsasthesis.cls in the same directory as thesis.tex so that pdflatex can find it when compiling the document.

GSAS requires that all supplementary materials go to one appendix at the end of the thesis, rather than at the end of each chapter. An easy way to deal with this is to create an appendix chapter for each thesis chapter and dump them all into appendix.tex.

Class options

gsasthesis.cls is extends the standard report class, and passes all options to report. Therefore, options 12pt, 10pt, draft, a4paper, etc behave like in the report class.

Tips

Continuous footnote numbering

footnote numbering is reset every chapter by default. If you want it continuous throughout the document put the following code into the preamble:

\usepackage{chngcntr}
\counterwithout{footnote}{chapter}
    

Big tables and figures

Use the rotating package and the sidewaysfigure and sidewaystable environments (instead of table and figure) to rotate tables and figure 90 degrees. Use the longtable package and the longtable environment (instead of tabular) for long tables that are longer than one page. The sample thesis has examples of how to make it work.

• Read through the comments in the .tex files, they contain other useful pointers.

Alternatives

• Davide Cantoni and Halla Yang wrote a similar class, =harvardeconthesis.cls=, which writes the class file from scratch. The disadvantage of this approach is that the class file needs to define all sectioning commands such as \section, define all options that can be passed to class, such as 12pt or draft, default spacing, etc. This makes it hard to know which commands have been modified relative to the article or report class and, or which have not been defined, which may result in unexpected behaviour in some scenarios. In addition, the gsasthesis.cls file solves the open bugs present in the harvardeconthesis.cls class. An advantage of harvardeconthesis is that it has worked for Davide, Halla and many others, so it should work for most people (although some GSAS requirements have changed since, so you may need to tweak it!).
• Scott Kominers hacked Alex Barnett’s huthesis.cls format (see http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~ahb/thesis/format.html). Like harvardeconthesis, huthesis writes the class file from scratch
• If you have XeTeX installed, you can also try https://github.com/suchow/LaTeX-template-for-Harvard-dissertation