Easy Thesis

By Espen Riskedal: email

What is it?

Easy Thesis is just a package containing template-files that makes it easier to write a thesis. Basically you install the needed software and the package, and within 10min you can start writing on your thesis and produce nice PDF files. The package and documentation is made for Win32/Cygwin but also works 100% on a UNIX system.

Who is it for?

University students writing a boring but professional looking thesis that contains equations, figures and tables :) Ok, you don't need to be a university student and it don't need to be boring. Still, you can't be afraid of computers as some of the steps might look intimidating at first glance.

What does it include?

  1. A Makefile - this handles the process of generating the thesis.pdf file.
  2. thesis.tex - the main .tex file that you rarely touch and where I've made a lot of choices for you.
  3. books.bib - an example Bibliography file
  4. example .tex files - study these to get clues

Features

  • 100% free!
  • Produces thesis.pdf file
  • Handles numbering of pages, chapters, sections, images and tables.
  • Handles PNG/JPEG/PDF/EPS images and figures (EPS files are converted to PDF files automatically)
  • Generates Bibliography automatically (uses BibTeX)
  • Acknowledgments page
  • Generates list of contents automatically
  • Generates list of figures automatically
  • Generates list of tables automatically
  • Glossary page

Why?

LaTeX is nice, and with pdflatex it's great! But it takes time to set up an environment that actually does what you want! Its silly everybody has to reinvent the wheel so I thought I'd do the grunt work for you... I mean writing a thesis is hard enough in itself :)

You could ofcourse use Word or OpenOffice, but they both suck :) Word can't format any complex math equations and OpenOffice (or actually I tried it when it was called StarOffice) was (is?) BLOATED!

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