Page Layout ⇒ Newbie trying to compose a PhD thesis

[drbasitiqbal]

Hi.
I have nearly finished compsing my PhD thesis in MS Word. However I have hated the limitation and the amount of work needed in getting formatting right.

So I wish to convert it to LateX using LyX. Generally its been a breeze with all the resources available on the internet, but some issues still stump me.

My supervsior wishes that the author on the title page be left aligned rather than centered. Any ideas as to how to go about it?

Regards.

[jk_31]

Hello!
I also did my PhD thesis in LaTeX, so welcome!)

How did you create the title page?
using

in the preamble
\title{...}
\author{...}
\date{...}

and then in the document:
\maketitle
?

If you want to manually create a title page, then you have to omit the \maktitle command in the LyX document. But instead insert LaTeX code box (the red box) and insert there the
\begin{titlepage} ... \end{titlepage} environment.
This creates automatically a right-handed page there (with invisble page number). This is the title page. But there you have to manually write in where to put which text in which form. For this, you might need text formatting commands.

Useful text formatting commands for title pages:
%scriptsizes:
\Huge \huge \LARGE \Large \large \normalsize \small
%italic:
\textit{...}
%bold face:
\textbf{...}
%small caps:
\textsc{...}
%centering:
\begin{center} ... \end{center}
%left align text:
\begin{flushleft} ... \end{flushleft}
%right align text:
\begin{flushright} ... \end{flushright}
%change font:
\textrm{...} Roman (standard)
\textsf{...} Sans serif

And most important you have to add horizontal and vertical space manually:

Horizontal space:
\hspace{...}
% in the argument you tell LaTeX how much additional space should be inserted at the position of the command.
% e.g. 1in, 1cm, 5mm, 5em (em means the witdh of an 'M' in the current font) or 5ex (ex means wirth of an 'x' in the current font)
Vertical space:
\vspace{...}
%argument like in \hspace{...}
but important for vertical space command is, it is not executed right at the position of the command, but at the next line break '\\'
but this only if there is some content. So use to be sure '~\\' or ’\\~' - these '~' locked empty space signs make that there is some invisible content
another very useful command is \phantom{some text} which makes invisible text and can be used to create horizontal and vertical spaces, too.

I hope this helps you. If not, you can write me private message.

[jk_31]

I wonder that you are happy with LyX.
When I began my thesis, I didn't want to learn LaTeX and tried it with LyX. But then I had to face the problem that I didn't know what I was actually doing. (Like you with the title page).
My problems with my figures were much bigger (they were to big and the figure legends must be placed on the next site). It ended up that I learned LaTeX from the scratch and I wrote my whole thesis using a text editor where I put manually each command. Which LyX template did you use?

[cgnieder]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Would you mind if I moved this thread from the New Members forum to a more suiting one, Page Layout maybe?

Regards

[Johannes_B]

You can read a bit more about titlepages.

@jk Are you aware of the difference of a linebreak and a paragraph break? It is very important, also on titlepages. That is why i avoided the use of linebreaks and put proper paragraph breaks. Seems to be a bbit more writing, but it is worth it.

[jk_31]

@Johannes_B: I'm not that aware, I think.
It is anyway empty space one wants to put into the title page isn't it? But you mean one should avoid to use \\ and instead write \newline?
I thought anyway one has to look at the result and tweak around with the title page ...

[Johannes_B]

The title page is a bit of a special case. \\ really is a command to break into the next line and it is great in tabular-environments and lists. I don't want to go into detail right now, but titlepages are often lists as well.
Or in other words, a titlepage is something hand crafted, takes quite a few manual work and there are no paragraphs of text.


On a titlepage, the use of \par is a tiny bit more accurate, but in the real document, with real text, it is really important to use \par (or a blank line) to mark the end of a paragraph. If you want an empty line between the paragraphs, please have a look at package parskip.

Many users unfortunately have no idea, so i wanted to point it out once more.


Something i missed earlier: 1 em, as you stated correctly, is the width of latin capital letter m (M), but 1 ex is the height of latin letter x (x).

[jk_31]

The title page is a bit of a special case. \\ really is a command to break into the next line and it is great in tabular-environments and lists. I don't want to go into detail right now, but titlepages are often lists as well.
Or in other words, a titlepage is something hand crafted, takes quite a few manual work and there are no paragraphs of text.


On a titlepage, the use of \par is a tiny bit more accurate, but in the real document, with real text, it is really important to use \par (or a blank line) to mark the end of a paragraph. If you want an empty line between the paragraphs, please have a look at package parskip.

Many users unfortunately have no idea, so i wanted to point it out once more.


Something i missed earlier: 1 em, as you stated correctly, is the width of latin capital letter m (M), but 1 ex is the height of latin letter x (x).

Oh thank you! You know really more than the books/tutorials which I read until now.
They were all using \\ and don't even mention \par in the whole book. (I just had a look again.)
And my mistake 1 ex means the height of course! Thank you!)