UC and UCSB Thesis and Dissertation LaTeX Template

ucthesis latex style

This is a "very quick start guide" for writing dissertations with the ucthesis.cls LaTeX style file. The style file that you will find in this directory started with version 3.0 from CTAN, got modified for UCSB's ECE department's guidelines in 1997, and I changed it to accomodate a few new UCSB requirements and to make some additional layout improvements. It also includes the minor additions of version 3.1 from CTAN.

Very briefly, the most important information:
The main LaTeX file is Dissertation.tex and all major settings happen in there. The \documentclass can have the following options: a font size, oneside or twoside, and final or draft. The 10pt and 11pt options were not tested and are possibly outdated, so use the 12pt font size for now. The "twoside,draft" version is the fastest to compile as it uses placeholders for images and it's the easiest to read, the "oneside,final" is what the graduate division wants.

Copy the tarball or all the files from this directory to a local directory and you're ready to go. There's also a Makefile, but you'll probably have to adapt it to a *nix platform. Now read ucthesis.readme for all further documentation. It's pretty straight forward. In addition to what's explained in there, these are some further changes:

The default page style is headandbotcent. To change it, use \ps@x in the Dissertation.tex, where x is headings, plain, botcent, or headandbotcent.
A new UCSB guideline requests the approval page to be unnumbered yet counted, this is reflected here. The "headandbotcent" pagestyle prints page numbers centered in the footers and chapter names in the headers. Headers have a line underneath. Headers are typed in definable \headercase. Figure and Table captions are bold, always flush left. Also added is an environment "germanabstract" to include a German Zusammenfassung after the abstract. In twoside printing, a lot of the frontmatter gets its own doublepage.
Note that the results, particularly the margins, differ between pdflatex (at least on the Mac) and dvips+ps2pdf. The settings in the style file and template are for dvips and ps2pdf. You might have to make adjustments for pdflatex.
(The files uctest.bib, uctest.tex, uc10.clo, and uc11.clo are copied here only because they're on the CTAN web site.)


Last modified: Wed Jul 11 10:57:10 PDT 2007
Matz.