General ⇒ Thesis Template

[upani1982]

Hi All,

I am a research scholar working in economics. I want to write my thesis in LaTeX. I do not have any programming knowledge but I have already submitted my first seminar report in LaTeX. I love this forum as it is the source of inspiration for a newcomer like me. Please suggest whether I should proceed with the thesis writing with LaTeX or not. If yes, can you provide me some templates. The second question how to produce good quality tables and graphs from Excel file in LaTeX. Then I think I will be able to write in LaTeX.

Please suggest me as I am confused between LaTeX and Word but I love LaTeX for its quality document.

Please bear with my mistakes if I have made any in the above as I am a naive in this area.


Thanks and Regards,
Upananda

[kamrul_islam]

Hi Upananda,

You can use latex easily. For regular purpose do not need almost any programming knowledge at all. It's a regular text scripting. There are a number of thesis template in the web e.g.,
http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/tex ... esisStyle/
http://help-csli.stanford.edu/tex/suthesis/.

To create a table easily you can try excel2latex that converts an excel table to latex table. To my knowledge the best table package is ctable.

You need to save the excel graph to any image format and then convert it to eps (if needed) which you can do using ImageMagick. I prefer tikz and pgfplot though.

Hope it will help you.

[localghost]

Use templates with caution. They might contain code that you don't understand and which causes problems if you want some modifications. I suggest to build a document from scratch where you only add packages that you really need and from which you know what they do. A nice layout for your document is provided by the classicthesis package.


Thorsten