Note that the sample chapter provided in this template is essentially the readme.txt.  If you have read this chapter, stop reading now.  There is nothing new here, and in fact there's more detail in the sample chapter: I reproduce this here only in case you've deleted the sample material in the template and are only now running into a problem.

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Before going any further, note that this template is provided ***as a convenience to you***.  No warrantee or responsibility is offered or implied.  The faculty of graduate studies publishes guidelines for theses, and I altered a template based on principles I like my own graduate students to follow. If yours or your supervisors are different, feel free to start from scratch or write your own template.  If you are a student frantically having last minute problems with this template as you try to meet a deadline, the fault is yours.  Using this template does not absolve you of the responsibility of checking that you are indeed meeting FGS guidelines for submitting your thesis: do not be surprised if they have changed since the last time this template was updated. Again, the responsibility of this all comes down to you.

This thesis template is based on the Harvard thesis template.  More accurately, it *is* the Harvard thesis template, with changes made by others, and a few made by me to fix particular problems I had over the years.  I have also adapted some small things (e.g. the bibliography style) to my preferences.  Everything here is acceptable to the University of Manitoba as of the date of this writing, but so are many other styles you might prefer to those used here. I make no argument for using these formatting choices over others, I simply provide them for convenience.  Use what works for you, and make sure you get and read a copy of the current thesis guidelines from the Faculty of Graduate Studies.

The way this template is organized is with each chapter or appendix as a separate LaTeX file, with a master LaTeX file that gathers them all up.  This is nice as your thesis gets longer, so that you don't have to wait for the processing of many other chapters just to see what the current chapter you're working on looks like.  Simply alter the lines in the master file to include or exclude particular chapters as you go.  You do have to remember that it is the *master file* on which you need to run LaTeX commands (i.e. thesis.tex in this template) because the master file defines the type of document and much of the formatting information.  You'll only get errors if you try to directly run LaTeX on the individual chapter files, since they don't have enough information to define a complete document. You also, of course, need to fill in the front matter with details correct for your particular thesis.  The template is set for proper double-sided printing.  You can edit the document type in the master LaTeX file to make it single sided for the single-sided copy that is required by the Faculty of Graduate Studies.  The template defaults to double-sided, both to save paper when submitting it to your committee and because you probably want double-sided for binding up your final document 

I prefer students to use a bibliographic format that orders the bibliography by name and shows the authors' names in a citation, to reduce the frequency of having to flip back to the bibliography. The natbib format is nice for this, and allows you to cite with full citations, like this [Anderson, 2007], or citations wherethe author's name is already used in the sentence, such as when referring to the work of Burgard et. al [2000]. Thus, one can avoid repeating names in a citation that are already given appropriate context in the text itself. You can even get the bib format to look up the author from a citation and have his or her name appear appropriately in your text as you write it, but without a full citation: Birk's domain, from the work [Birk 2006]. If you turn to the bibliography in this sample document, however, you'll see that all the names are abbreviated - this keeps things consistent-looking even if you have sloppy BibTex data (e.g. having some entries with full names and some with initials is pretty notorious and results in a very sloppy-looking bibliography). The bibliography style used here is easily changed if your advisor prefers something different (for example, use plainnat if you want the names verbatim just as they are in your BibTex.  There are also other bibliographic templates that have been created for natbib (for example, I have included the IEEE Transactions version for natbib, which can be used by setting the bibliography type to IEEEtranN).  The included natbib documentation also describes how to make up your own styles. Further, there is no requirement to use natbib at all - the normal styles (e.g. ACM, IEEE) most associated with work in computer science could just be used directly, but without the text formatting advantages of natbib.

LaTeX takes a bit of getting used to, but there are some nice editors out there for it that make your job easier.  LaTeX is most commonly associated with a UNIX environment, but Windows tools exist as well (I like WinEDT and use it often).

Appendices are typically used in theses to present supplemental information - for example, the data that goes into the summaries described in your thesis. They may also be used to present supplemental information (e.g. proofs) whose inclusion in the main text might be distracting from the main point of your thesis. Whatever you use them for, you will typically have tables in it.  There are lots of good web pages and other forms of documentation on LaTeX's tabular environment, which is not trivial to use. There is also a reasonable Excel macro available (Excel2LaTeX) that you can use to convert an Excel spreadsheet to a LaTeX table while preserving much of the formatting information. This can save yourself a lot of formatting work. I have included that macro in same package as the rest of this template.

Writing your thesis is a signicant challenge if you have never written a large document before, but the result should be something you can take a great deal of pride in. A good tool like LaTeX can help make the writing process a lot easier by taking care of the details for you.  I hope this template has taken care of a few details you might have had to look up as well.



