Thesis accepted (fixes)

[kati...@gmail.com]

DGS accepted my thesis yesterday, and I used this template. For the most part it worked pretty well, but I thought I'd share some fixes for problems I had at the end. My general impression is that some disciplines can use relatively simple preambles. My discipline (linguistics) has both embraced LaTeX as a typesetting format, but has a lot of legacy conventions for rendering data, analysis, captioning figures, and formatting references. This results in more complicated preambles, custom bib styles, and the use of a lot of niche packages. Note as well that I used XeLaTeX as my compiler due to the fact that it handles Unicode and special fonts in a much nicer way than standard LaTeX and using e.g. tipa. So, these fixes are worth trying if you run into these issues.

1. Overfull hboxes and weird hyphenation were a big issue. This may be a XeLaTeX/fontspec problem, as microtype doesn’t work very well for XeTeX. \mbox{} generally didn't work; my solution was to use this line immediately after \begin{document}:

 

\emergencystretch 3em

This created some underfull hboxes, but none of those actually cashed out to something visually incorrect, save for a couple of minipages not aligning with certain captions correctly. However, those were hacky uses of a discipline-specific package and were a discipline-specific caption style (i.e. not required to be in a list of figures/tables); since the result was merely slightly ugly and didn’t break DGS guidelines, I said screw it. With COVID-19 making things so weird and uncertain, I wanted to get this done.

 

2. If you have a long frontmatter section, your roman numerals above xv will start to bleed into the right margin. The solution to this (from https://code.google.com/archive/p/ucsd-thesis/issues/50) was to go into the ucsd.cls file itself and to change the first line of the TOC section (1079) from \def\@pnumwidth{1.55em} to \def\@pnumwidth{2.55em}

3. The default template has \singlespace after the \bibliography command. I had to move it before \bibliography to actually get my bibliography to be single spaced. This may be due to using a discipline-specific bib style, or because I was using natbib, but this code worked:

 

\newcommand{\newblock}{}
\bibliographystyle{language}
\singlespace
\bibliography{dissrefs}

4. I needed a list of Abbreviations; I adopted a solution from another user on this board, which was to add the following lines after \listoftables/figures

\newpage
\phantomsection
\addcontentsline{toc}{frontmatter}{List of Abbreviations}  % This adds the section to the TOC
\centerline{\expandafter\uppercase\expandafter{List of Abbreviations}}% This uses the same title format as other pages
\bigskip% Same spacing as other pages
\noindent \textsc{Acc}: accusative \\
\noindent \textsc{Antic}: anticipatory \\%etc...

Note that I just so happened to have only enough Abbreviations to fit on one page/one column; I'm not sure what would have happened if I had more.

5. Probably the biggest headache was getting the bibliography to appear in the TOC. Why did it not appear there? I don't know; I know ucsd.cls has code that makes it happen, but it didn't. But, I've seen other people struggle with this before, so I thought I'd add my troubleshooting. Note that there was no easy solution to this issue, but here are the steps and warnings:

- StackExchange suggests the package tocbibind for this general problem. Don't do it! It will put the bib in the toc, but it will break the formatting of your list of figures/tables such that figures/tables will be listed without Figure/Table, and they get chapter formatting (big left-adjusted titles, double spacing). 

- One solution that worked some of the time (but not all of the time) was to add this line:

\renewcommand\bibname{{Bibliography}}%
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Bibliography}

Where these lines went sort of varied. Sometimes they went in the frontmatter after \listof..., and sometimes in the preamble. After I changed/added some text in the main body of the document, it stopped working altogether. However, another user on this board says that this is the solution to getting your Bibliography to be named "References", so maybe it'll work for you.

- The ultimate solution was to go into main.toc and manually add the following line:

\contentsline {chapter}{\numberline { }Bibilography}{##}%

Where ## corresponds to the first page of the Bibliography in your compiled document. This creates an unnumbered chapter line at the end of your TOC that aligns properly. Note that this only works for a single compile; the .cls will overwrite your main.toc, so you will need to manually edit the toc each time it compiles (so don’t add it until you’re sure you’re done making all changes).

I hope these help. Good luck everyone, and stay healthy!

[Ben Cipollini]

This is amazing, thanks for sharing! :)

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ucsd-thesis" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ucsd-thesis...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ucsd-thesis/b37d35a0-29f5-447c-9122-897bc8e97c9b%40googlegroups.com.