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In this tutorial series we are going to teach you how to write a basic thesis using latex
We are going to be using share latex as our latex editor but you could use whichever editor
you feel most comfortable with If you have never used latex before you may
want to first watch our beginners latex tutorial series which you can find on our channel
Your thesis could be the longest and most complicated document you will ever write which
is why its such a good idea to use latex instead of a common wordprocessor
Latex makes tasks that are difficult and awkward in wordprocessors far simpler
To get started we will open a blank project When writing something like a thesis its worth
splitting the document into multiple tex files It's also wise to organize the project using
folders In this example we will create two new folders
One for all the images used in the project and one for all the tex files making up the
main body of the thesis Now lets return to our main tex file
This is the root document and is the tex file that will draw the whole document together
The first thing we need to choose is a document class
The article class isn't designed for writing long documents like a thesis, so we will choose
the report class We will also the change the font size by adding
square brackets into the \documentclass command and specifying 12 pt
Let's also prepare the document for images by loading the graphicx package
We will also need to tell latex where to look for the images using the \graphicspath command
as we are storing them in a separate folder Now lets fill in the title, author and date
information Notice that i am adding the thesis title,
institute name and institution logo all into the title command, this isn't the best way
to alter the title page, so we will look at more elaborate ways of
customizing the title page later on in the series, but this will suffice for now
After the title page we will need to add an abstract, dedication, declaration, and acknowledgement
section, we will add each of these in on separate pages using unnumbered chapters,
To do this We use the \chapter command and add an asterick
After these sections, we will add a table of contents using the \tableofcontents command,
Now for the main body of the document, in my example, i will add five chapters
in, one of which will be introduction and another will be conclusion,
However, instead of just composing these chapters in this tex file i will create a separate
tex file for each chapter in the chapters folder
We can then fill in these chapters with text, remember to split them up into sections and
sub sections
And to add these chapters into the document we use the \input command in the root document,
remember to add in chapters forward slash before the file name so that latex knows where
to find it. I will now add in an appendix at the end of
the document, to do this, use the \appendix command to tell latex for what follows are
appendicies. we still need to declare a new chapter using the \chapter command, despite
having to use the appendix command, again we will write the appendix in a separate file
and then input it
If i now compile the document you will see all my chapters have been added to the document
and the table of contents has been automatically generated
this concludes the first part of the series, in the next video we will look at using the
fancy header package to configure headers and we will also use the geometry package
to change the page layout Please do subscribe to our channel to keep
up to date.