General ⇒ Help with savequote needed...

[moonlight]

Hi all,

I'm writing my thesis and using J. Steven's styling package called phdthesis.sty. There is also a page describing a bit this package on his website here.

The trouble is that he uses a twoside printing, whereas in my university I must use a oneside printing. So I modified the default options of the book document class to handle that. But then the quotations get displayed at the end of one page, and the chapter title at the beginning of the next: it is very annoying. The chapter number and quotation are meant to be displayed side by side.

My document doesn't contain much yet, and is basically a very simple example with J. Steven's styling. I use PdfTexify in WinEdt if that can help, although I doubt this is a software related issue.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
moonlight.

[moonlight]

Hi all,

Ok, I was able to fix the problem, after getting some sleep. My hack consists of dropping Stevens' PhD styling package and putting my own styling inside my thesis. If anyone else faces a similar problem in the future, here is the code I wrote:

Code: Select all

\documentclass[12pt]{report}                                        % report class with 12pt font
\usepackage{graphicx}                                                 % graphicx package for images
\usepackage{setspace}                                                % setspace package for line spacing
\usepackage[helvetica]{quotchap}                                 % the quotchap package to get fancy chapter styles
\usepackage{titlepage_oxford}                                      % my title page styling sheet

\begin{document}                                                       % start document here
\title{My thesis title}                                                   % the title
\author{My name}                                                       % my name
\date{January 2009}                                                    % the expected date
\maketitle                                                                   % make the title page

\begin{savequote}[10pc]                                              % start saving the quote
\sffamily Bla bla bla.                                                     % the actual quote
\qauthor{\textbf{Some clever guy}\\                              % author's name in bold + goto next line
\emph{Journal}, vol 11, p. 442, (1950)}                           % refs of the quote.
\end{savequote}                                                         % end save quote

% next comes the meat: redefine the baselineskip for the chapter head start to -5.0. It is normally set to 2.3 in the quotechap package

\renewcommand{\chapterheadstartvskip}{\vspace*{-5\baselineskip}}

\chapter{Introduction}                                          % start chapter 1 here.

In Steven's package he uses a similar technique, however resetting this baseline skip in the same way doesn't work there because as soon as you switch from 'twoside' to 'oneside' printing, it makes the quote disappear. So this is a hack, not really a solution: I still have no idea what the original problem was due to, and would be curious to know.

Hope this will be useful to someone, someday.

Cordially,
moonlight.

[localghost]

If you would have said that this savequote environment comes from quotchap, you would have gotten help much earlier. There exist some other very good solutions to create such epigraphs [1]. Just take a look at them.

[1] View Topic - Introductory quotes in latex


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten¹

[moonlight]

Thanks for the welcome localghost.

I'm still quite new to all this Tex typsetting. I thought it was obvious what the package was. Sorry.