Our CS department (of University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt) offers a LaTeX template to our students, that they can use to create Bachelor’s and Master’s theses. This template can be found here.

In this article I want do describe how to work with the thesis template in the Latex environnement that I proposed in my previous article (used tools: TeX Live, Visual Studio Code, and LaTeX Workshop).

Introduction

In a previous post I have described how to setup a LaTeX environment based on the following tool stack:

  • TeX Live (link - version installed on my machine: TeX Live 2016) - very popular LaTeX distribution that brings along a huge number of packages.
  • Visual Studio Code (aka VS Code - link - version installed on my machine: 1.22.2) - rather lightweight but very powerful IDE that brings great extendability for a vast variate of different languages.
  • LaTeX Workshop (link - version installed on my machine: 5.3.1) - extension for Visual Studio Code that aims to provide all-in-one features and utilities for LaTeX typesetting (list of features can be found here).

For reasons why I consider this stack to be very useful and a description on how to set it up, please refer to the article. For the remainder of this article, I assume you have a working setup of the tool chain, according to the article.

Step 1: Clone the Thesis-Template

Use the git client of your choosing to clone the repository locally. Using the console client, the command is:

git clone git@github.com:mbredel/thesis-template.git

Step 2: Configure VS Code

The thesis-template repository brings along a make file for pdf generation. Although I managed to run it from VS Code, I did not get SyncTex to work properly.

When viewing a tex-file and a pdf-file side-by-side in VS Code, SyncTex allows you to jump to a specific place in the pdf by clicking in the tex file (and the other way around). This is a very handy feature, especially when dealing with long documents (such as a thesis). For further information on this, please review the Visual Studio Code LaTeX Workshop Extension documentation.

Due to these limitations, I recommend the standard LaTeX Workshop Extension’s way of generating a document instead of the make file. In order to do that, first open VS Code and change the workspace configuration to the following. This is done the same way as I already described in my previous article. Thus, no further explanation should be necessary.

{
    "latex-workshop.latex.recipes": [
        
        {
            "name": "pdflatex -> bibtex -> pdflatex*2",
            "tools": [
                "pdflatex",
                "bibtex",
                "pdflatex",
                "pdflatex"
            ]
        }
    ],
    "latex-workshop.latex.tools": [
        {
            "name": "latexmk",
            "command": "latexmk",
            "args": [
                "-synctex=1",
                "-interaction=nonstopmode",
                "-file-line-error",
                "-pdf",
                "%DOC%"
            ]
        },
        {
            "name": "pdflatex",
            "command": "pdflatex",
            "args": [
                "-synctex=1",
                "-interaction=nonstopmode",
                "-file-line-error",
                "%DOC%"
            ]
        },
        {
            "name": "bibtex",
            "command": "bibtex",
            "args": [
                "%DOCFILE%"
            ]
        },
        {
            "name": "biber",
            "command": "biber",
            "args": [
                "%DOCFILE%"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Once you have added the workspace settings, return to the editing view of the thesis.tex-file. Choose the item “Build LaTeX project (Alt+Ctrl+B)” from the context menu. Now a pdf should be generated properly without errors.

This is the way I recommend to create the pdf during thesis writing. Once your are done and want to create the final version that you hand in and print, I strongly encourage you to use the make file with the publish parameter, as it will embed all fonts.

make publish

I strongly encourage you to develop your thesis in your own Git repository. Besides having a backup, this also gives you the possibility revert any changes you may accidentally have made in the middle of the night and regret in the morning ;-).

In order to get your own remote Git repository you can choose between a lot of options. The most obvious one are [GitHub}(https://github.com/) (please keep in mind this ist most likely public) or GitLab. However, if you are a student of the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt you can also choose our own GitLab server code.fbi.h-da.de.

In any case, once you have your own remote Git repository you can push the thesis-template repository that you cloned in step 1 to your own repository by executing the following steps.

cd existing_repo_where_you_cloned_the_thesis_template_repo
git remote rename origin old-origin
git remote add origin <address of your own repository>
git push -u origin --all
git push -u origin --tags