Page Layout ⇒ Make LaTeX document follow custom style guidelines

[xfoist]

Hi.

I am studying medicine at the university and I am currently writing my thesis. Because I have a background studying Mathematics/Physics/Programming I have come in contact with LaTeX, but never really used it before. I started of my thesis work in MS Word, but I didn't like the way I had to go about including references and that it didn't really work with my version control solution (Git). Anyway, I am really excited about what LaTeX has to offer and even though I am a complete beginner I am somewhat used to the "coding/compiling-process" and I am eager to learn. The main problem I'm facing is that my school is very stubborn when it comes to the layout of the thesis and after googling for a few days I still feel lost when it comes to formatting the document according to their demands.

The layout has to be as follows (translated to English, as best I could) :

Font

• Times New Roman
  Black

Font size

• Title on title page: 24 pt, bold
  Subtitle on title pate: 16 pt, italic
  Body text: 12 pt
  Abstract, (including headings): 11 pt (headings in bold)
  Section heading 1: 16 pt, bold
  Section heading 2: 14 pt, bold
  Section heading 3: 12 pt, italic
  Table/Figure heading: 11 pt, bold
  Table/Figure text: 11 pt

Line spacing

• Body text and section headings: 1.5 lines
  Title and subtitle on title page, abstract, tables, table text, figure text: 1 line
  Bibliography: an empty line between references

Text justification

• Body text, section headings 1-3, page header: smooth left and right margins

Margins

• 2.5 cm all around

Paragraph

• No indentation. Line break with blank line 1,5

Table

• Numbers and text inside tables should be centred

Bibliography

• Vancouver style references

Some of these I have been able to solve already (font family, margins) and I am not looking to be served a complete solution. I would be grateful however if anyone could point me in the right direction. Are there any packages that would be useful?

(I also could use some help with a custom title page design, but I'll post that in another thread)

Peter.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Peter,

welcome to the forum!

Great that you already solved a part of the challenges. It would be good if you would post your document, as far as you got (without your thesis text of course), so it could be the basis to improve. And we can see what is already done.

Stefan

[xfoist]

Hi Stefan and thank you!

Currently my main document, which implements the formatting, looks like this:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[12pt,titlepage]{article}

\usepackage{times}
\usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage{parskip}
\usepackage[margin=2.5cm]{geometry}

\usepackage{subfiles}

\onehalfspacing

\title{Title}
\author{Peter}
\date{\today}

\begin{document}

\bibliographystyle{vancouver}

\maketitle

\subfile{../01_Abstract/abstract}

\subfile{../02_Abbreviations/abbreviations}

\subfile{../03_Introduction/introduction}

\subfile{../04_Aims/aims}

\subfile{../05_Materials_and_Methods/materials_and_methods}

\subfile{../06_Statistics/statistics}

\subfile{../07_Ethical_Considerations/ethical_considerations}

\subfile{../08_Results/results}

\subfile{../09_Discussion/discussion}

\subfile{../10_Conclusions/conclusions}

\subfile{../11_Acknowledgements/acknowledgements}

\subfile{../12_References/references}

\subfile{../13_Attachments/attachments}

\end{document}

This makes it look somewhat right, even though I have no idea what the actual font size is on the section headings and the line spacing seems to differ from the word counterpart, even though both are specified to 1.5.