Arizona State University Dissertation/Thesis Template in LaTeX

Arizona State University (ASU) is one of the largest universities in the US. It must have tens of thousands of graduate students in attendance at any given time, many of whom need to write and submit a thesis or dissertation. All theses and dissertations need to following the formatting guidelines of ASU’s Graduate College (latest revision [July 2013] available here).

So I was surprised to see that ASU’s current LaTeX template is fairly basic. By writing this, I do not mean to criticize its author, who (as I understand the situation) was a graduate student who created a template that worked reasonably well and decided to make it available to others. ASU then adopted this student’s work as the template it would officially distribute to students. But as far as I know, the student who created the template did not invest a great deal of time or effort into it, and as a result, the template is rather shallow. It has the correct margins, and the table of contents will come out more or less correct, but what if you want to include appendices, for example? Or use biblatex for citations instead of natbib?

I did the formatting for my PhD dissertation on my own and created a new LaTeX template, which is available on GitHub here. (If you’re not familiar with git, you can grab everything simply by clicking the “Download ZIP” button to get the template and supporting files in a ZIP archive. Or just click here.)

Sample title page of dissertation template; click for image full sample PDF

The biggest (and, in my opinion, the most beneficial) difference between the official template and this new one is that the new template uses the memoir document class. The memoir document class is designed for formatting book-length works. For example, it has commands for indicating divisions between front matter, main matter, and back matter and adjusts formatting accordingly. So it’s a natural choice for formatting theses and dissertations which are book-length works. memoir is also a very large document class that natively supports many features without having to load other packages. It can natively format footnotes and endnotes, for example, and the table of contents can be highly customized using only memoir commands. The template I created definitely loads other packages, but I would guess that memoir is probably the most complete document class out there. And finally, memoir has excellent documentation, which is currently over 600 pages long. If there’s some confusing code in the template I created or if someone wants to add a new feature to their own thesis/dissertation, there’s a better chance that the documentation for memoir will provide the answer than for other document classes.

Some of the other improvements over the official template include the following:

• Includes all required and optional sections, including a copyright page, dedication, acknowledgements, preface, endnotes, and biographical sketch.
• Correct formatting for main matter (chapters) and back matter (appendices), which makes it easy to organize your entire document.
• For the typesetting engine, works with either pdftex or xetex. (xetex makes it easy to use any of the approved fonts.)
• For references, works with natbib and biblatex. (biblatex makes it easy to use Chicago, MLA, and APA style references.)
• Better separation of content and formatting. For example, write your table captions however you want and they will appear correctly in the list of tables. This arrangement makes it much easier to produce another (much better-looking version) of your dissertation/thesis in case you want to share a better-looking version with colleagues.
• Internal document references work. For example, clicking on an in-text citation jumps down to that citation in the references list.
• Bookmarks work, so there is a navigation side menu in the PDF that contains the major document elements (e.g., table of contents and each chapter heading), so the PDF is easier to navigate.
• Writes PDF metadata (including the title, name, and keywords) automatically.
• Uses the memoir document class, so it is easier to change formatting and create a book-length work in general.

There were challenges to getting all these features working together. Strangely enough, one of the most difficult challenges was getting chapter-level and part-level headings to appear uppercased in the table of contents. It turns out that the typical commands for uppercasing text in the table of contents conflict with the hyperref package. (I’ve written a separate post on my solution here.) But overall, I think I’ve found reasonably elegant solutions for implementing the formatting requirements in ASU’s style guide.

I have intentionally not created a style file, yet. In my experience, troubleshooting a document with a custom style file leads to headaches because it requires hunting through the style file and the preamble to figure out where problems are. I think it’s better to have all the potentially problematic code in one lengthy preamble. If there is enough interest in either a style file or packaging everything in a class, I will create them, but at least initially, I am just making a simple template file available to everyone.

Formatting a dissertation or thesis is often one of the less pleasant parts of the graduate student experience. It’s the last thing students need to do before they’re finally done with an often long and difficult graduate school experience, and formatting is usually tedious and time-consuming. Hopefully, this template can take some of the pain out of that experience for ASU graduate students.

Again, the template is available on GitHub here. You can grab everything simply by clicking the “Download ZIP” button to get the template and supporting files in a ZIP archive. I did the formatting for my PhD dissertation on my own and created a new LaTeX template, which is available on GitHub here. If you’re not familiar with git, you can grab everything simply by clicking the “Download ZIP” button to get the template and supporting files in a ZIP archive, or just click here.