How to write a thesis using LaTeX **full tutorial**

In this video I'm going to show you how to write a  beautiful thesis using latex and I don't mean the   actual content of the thesis that's up to you what  I mean here is how do you take that content put it   into a document and actually beautifully display  it for example this is my thesis and there's lots   of equations and paragraphs and figures structured  like bibliographies and references and appendices   how do you take all of that and make one beautiful  document so that's what we're going to talk about   in this video now if you're a complete beginner  to LaTeX that's totally fine I actually have two   previous videos that introduced LaTeX from the  very beginning so check those out down in the   description but in this video we're going to build  on that to talk about all the different components   that are relevant for writing a thesis now if  you're on the fence about whether you should   even use LaTeX for your thesis like do you want  to learn this whole markup language or do you   just want to try it with Microsoft word well  it depends a little bit on your discipline for   example I'm in mathematics and it's just standard  that pretty much everybody writes their theses in   mathematics because LaTeX is just so powerful for  being able to display equations but if you're in   many other disciplines I still encourage you to  try and consider writing LaTeX for your thesis   it's just so powerful at being able to tightly  control a consistent look over your entire thesis   to keep track of things like numbering and to have  a precise control over exactly how you want it to   look LaTeX is just totally worth it in my view  particularly for investing the time to actually   write a thesis now to get started in LaTeX you  need to have some sort of LaTeX editor now there's   a lot of LaTeX editors out there but the one that  I've really enjoyed for the last several years   is Overleaf and actually I'm really proud that  they have become the sponsor of today's video   because overleaf is one that you don't have  to install anything it's all based in your   web browser everything's stored inside of the  cloud and it just makes it so much easier to   learn and to create in LaTeX and it's up to you  as a completely free version which i actually   appreciate is really good like you can write your  entire thesis in LaTeX you don't need to upgrade   but it also has some really nice quality  of life upgrades like keeping track of a   whole bunch of different versions and  sharing with all of your collaborators   like for example your thesis advisors and so for  me at least upgrading to the paid versions is   totally worth it but but I'll leave that choice up  to you okay with those preliminaries said and done   let's get into the video before i even create a  new project I'm actually just going to create a   new folder here I'll call this youtube and this  allows me to put everything related to a thesis   which might be many many different files all in  one nice folder come up here and we are going to   start a brand new project and there's a couple  options we're actually in this video going to   use a blank project like we're going to start from  the beginning and I'm going to show you how to do   everything but it's often nice if you scroll down  here you can see some of the templates that are   available on the Overleaf website so for example  for thesis if I show the gallery of all items your   university may well have a template already so for  example i did my PhD at the University of Toronto   and i can just click this here to import the  university of Toronto standard thesis with all   the requirements for formatting already in there  so definitely check out the gallery to see if your   university is here or if there's just a template  you really like so for the purpose of this video   we're gonna go and just click on a blank project  and let's call it youtube thesis all right this   is a wonderful phd thesis that we're going to have  I'm going to hide the left-hand menu for now and   what i want to notice is that there's two sides  to this on the left-hand side we get our code   and then when we click the compile button it  spits out well what it's going to look like and   right now you have almost nothing so there's  a few things I'm going to do right off the bat   the document class is currently default set  to be article and I'm going to change this to   report and when i compile that already it changes  the look and feel there's a title page here and   then we have this beginning section which is  called introduction it appears on a new page   basically reports are designed for longer  documents than just an article was there's   other classes like book which is reasonable as  well but I'm going to use report now the first   thing i want to do is I'm going to change this  title which i have as youtube thesis that was   the name of the document and that's totally fine  but i want to add perhaps a university there so   I'm going to open a new section of braces here  I'm going to give it the size and there's lots   of different sizes you can do I'm going to choose  \Large which is actually a little bit smaller than   the size i set for the youtube thesis already and  I'm going to call it the university of youtube the   most prestigious university in the world and we  get youtube thesis and then university of youtube   i don't like that that's all in one line  so I'm going to come to youtube thesis   the double backslash allows me to end the line and  i have a slightly better title now i can make this   title page look fancier and nicer but that's what  we have for right now and i want to notice that   the actual body of the thesis is all going to go  between the begin document and the end document   the only two things i have there right now is  a section called \maketitle which just makes   the title page that's what the purpose is all of  that data that was collected here above the begin   document now that's turned into a title page and  then i have this new section and if i scroll down   here i can see this new section okay now the  first thing i want to do is I'm actually going   to get rid of this section here this introduction  we're going to deal with that a little bit later   because in a thesis there's usually a few things  that happen before the introduction and the first   of those is the abstract so what I'm going to  do is I'm going to set backslash chapter and   because i do not want my abstract and other things  that go ahead of the main body of the thesis like   a dedication and acknowledgement because i don't  want those to have chapter numbers i go \chapter*   and the star just says don't give this a chapter  number then I'm going to go and give abstract   and we can type whatever our thesis is going to be  about i can scroll down and now i have a section   called abstract which contains a little bit  of content probably it would be a little   bit longer if you're trying to write a whole phd  thesis same basic idea i can do the same chapter   with the star to say i don't want enumerated  maybe i want to make it a dedication page   and i can say oh you know for my subscribers  and maybe i would also like to have a   chatper let's change that chapter that's better a  chapter that's going to be called acknowledgements   overleaf by the way here is really nice it has  a spell checker built in so you see how it's   got the red line here saying there's something  wrong i right click and i can just do my spell   check so it's got those sort of like slightly  nicer features that surprisingly a lot of LaTeX   editors still don't have nevertheless i want to  thank and then you can fill that in okay so let's   compile that overleaf actually has a pretty cool  feature if you get tired clicking this recompile   button you can come down and click auto compile  on and it's just going to regularly be doing that   but basically does the equivalent of clicking  that button for you but regardless we have our   title page we have our abstract and we have our  dedication and then finally our acknowledgements   and that's all before we get to the body of the  thesis which is empty i really like using folders   because if you can think about a thesis it's going  to get really really long and if i try to put   the entire thesis in this one document like every  single thing I'm ever going to have in the thesis   is all in one document it's going to be too  much it's just going to be extremely long   so one of the things i like to do over here is  come and make separate chapters in separate files   that allows you to move the chapters around and  just open up one chapter and just deal with that   and only compile one chapter at once if you so  choose so what I'm going to do is in my folder I'm   going to click a new file and I'm going to call it  how about ch for chapter and then I'll see a I'll   say something like ch-youtubebuttons or something  silly like this and this creates this other tech   file not the main.tex file it's in a separate  one let's make another one like uh chapter   i don't know subscribers I'm just sort of using  youtube words as the the standard names here   and if i open one of these they're just blank  documents so if i want to actually fill them   in i have to add something so I'm going to make  this one how about this is going to be a \chapter   and in this chapter i actually want it to be  enumerated i want it to be chapter one so I'm   not going to put the star there and so I'm going  to call it youtube buttons and maybe this chapter   has three different sections it's going to have  one section called the subscribe button it's going   to have a section called the like button and uh oh  yeah i know we have a section on the notification   bell all the good youtube stuff okay so let's  go in there and compiling so now what's happened   well in the document there's no notion of this i  mean i don't i can scroll up and down through my   document i don't see it so what i have to do is to  make this connected with my document i go back to   main okay so what i type is \include and i really  love this about overleaf it's so smart because   it pops down this contextual menu of all the  different things that i might want to include well   i have two different tex files that are chapters  the subscribers and the youtube buttons ones   so I'm going to click the youtube buttons one  because that's the one I've added content to   I'm going to wait for it to recompile and it tells  me that i have an error i really like this about   overleaf so i had that error I'm going to click  and try to figure it out it says i suspect you   have forgotten a closing curly brace and this  happened at the spot \include{ch-youtubebuttons}   so let's go to that thing and see what's going  on here and indeed right there chapter youtube   buttons i never put that closed curly brace on  it so now when i recompile thank you overleaf   for showing me those error messages and explain to  me what my silliness was i get my abstract i get   my dedication i get my acknowledgements and now i  have chapter one the youtube buttons chapter which   includes these three sub sections the subscribe  button like button and the notification bell   and what i really want to notice here is how much  is being done automatically by LaTeX. LaTeX is   choosing this enumeration chapter 1 and 1.1 1.2  1.3 it's choosing all of this style now if you   don't like any of the style there's ways to tweak  all of it if you don't think this is the look that   you're going for we can tweak all of this but  the point is you can tweak it in one place and   it's going to infect the entire document and the  style of everything it's not like you're going and   increasing the font size at one spot that you  might forget about later on and be inconsistent   about okay so that's my beginning let's just  keep on going i better add at least something   to this subscribers.tex file I'll make this a  new uh chapter called how i got 100k subscribers and I'll say section and I'll call it make  funny youtube puns this is clearly the the   main trick and this is not connected so I've got  to go back to that main I've got the chapter on   youtube buttons I'll go \include again overleaf is  going to pop up the options and when i scroll down   i have this other chapter how i made 100  subscribers by doing funny youtube puns   so you can make as many chapters as you want you  can reorder them however you wish it just makes it   really really easy now as you get lots of chapters  and lots of sections you very well will want   an actual table of contents so let me show you  how you do this so what i have on the left is i   have these three chapters that I'm including in  the main.tex file and then I've included these   external chapters where most of my thesis is going  to be so the standard spot that you put your table   of cons is actually after your acknowledgements  here the command we want to use here is backslash   table of contents and if i compile this okay  let's see what happens well i have this nice   table of contents it shows me chapter one is  my youtube buttons chapter it's got those three   different sections chapter two is my how i got  100k subscribers and it has its particular section   you can see he's keeping track of the page numbers  here so page five page six and so forth now while   we're talking about chapters uh let's do a couple  more things I'm gonna make a conclusions chapter   nothing particularly fancy I'm just gonna \chapter  and conclusions you can choose to enumerate this   one or not it's a little bit up to you and then  I'm also going to make one the thing that often   goes after a conclusion is appendices and  dependencies are pretty much the same thing so I'm   going to write an appendix sometimes you're going  to have multiple things like appendix a appendix b   I'm just going to do one here and for the appendix  it looks just like a chapter at least for now   so I'm going to go chapter and I'll call  this one appendix so I've added two things   the conclusion and the appendix I'm going to  go back to main now look what i do for this   i want to include these into my document so I'm  going to go \include and I'm going to first add   that conclusions button nothing that happens much  there but i want to do something for the appendix   and the idea is i want to separate what chapters  are thought of as the main part of the thesis and   what chapters are thought of at the appendix so  to separate these i write backslash appendix and   now when i include a chapter it's going to be just  interpreted a little bit different so let's do the   exact same thing I'm going to include the appendix  thank you overly for popping this out and let me   go and compile everything and watch what happens  to the table of contents the conclusion was given   a chapter because i didn't put the star in the  \chapter it now is given a chapter number it's   chapter three according to this enumeration but  look at appendix appendix starts at a so the trick   is that when you went over here and used this  \appendix it basically resets the enumeration   and turns it to using alphabetical enumeration not  numerical enumeration so now i have this appendix   a and i could have appendix bcd and so forth now  i want to share with you a couple of overleaf's   premium features that just are extremely extremely  nice the first of these is just the ability to   have a whole bunch of collaborators if you want  to have a whole bunch of collaborators like   you've got a whole research team with you or you  have multiple different advisors who are on your   thesis committee well then it's really nice just  be able to share it with them so this is entirely   possible with overleaf you just add whoever it  is that you want to be and you can decide whether   they're going to be able to edit it or they're  just going to be able to read it and then they   can just contribute into your document the other  feature and i think this one is so incredibly nice   is the ability to go and look at your history so  i can come here and you can see on the right hand   side here i have a lot of different changes and  i can go back to previous states of my different   sections of my different documents so for example  i was just created recently i was playing around   with the youtube button one so if i if i open the  top one it looks exactly like we had it before   if i go to chapter youtube buttons from a while  ago okay back on 1:55 pm now i get the version of   it that doesn't have all that stuff with figures  so if i want to go back in the past and figure   out what's happening well then i can do that i can  compare this to a different version i can label my   version so i can sort of keep track of them and it  makes it very nice for over the course of years of   developing a thesis for you to figure out like  what's happening there's no worry you're gonna   accidentally delete something crucial and you'll  have missed something that you worked on years ago   you have your history you're safe okay so that's  the basic structure but let's try adding some   content and perhaps the most important thing is  any figures that you might make how do we deal   with that now in the previous video on LaTeX I've  talked about just creating a figure before but   i really want to talk more about figure management  how do i deal with having lots of figures in this   particular video so what I'm going to do is I'm  come up I'm going to make a new subfolder and this   is going to be called images and so here it is  i can go inside of my images and i have this new   folder then if i click on it I'm going to upload  and let me go and find some images I've created   three images already like notification  and subscribe and I'm going to open them   and they're loaded in and now if i expand  my images i have my three files there now   to actually get these images into your document  i actually need to use a new package so I'm back   here in main.tex and I'm going to do \include  excuse me not include i want to use \usepackage   and I'm going to use one called graphicx with an x  at the end this is the same one I've talked about   in my previous video it just allows me to include  nice figures now the place I'm going to go is in   my chapter on youtube buttons and the command here  is going to be backslash \begin{figure} and i want   to just let overleaf expand all the different data  and so let's come along and put this in there's   a few things in here you need to fill in so the  first of them is going to be where's your actual   image and so if i expand what my images were i  have my different buttons I'm in the subscribe   button one so let me go and write it this way  right i go inside my brackets and i go images and   as you see it's already started starting to pop  it up and I'm going to go to the subscribe button   then i need to give it some sort of caption and  I'm going to call the caption the subscribe button   i need to give it a label this is so that you can  internally reference it let's call it subscribe   I've talked about how to internally reference  it before and all right there we go let's go   and see what this looks like so going to number  one you see that it says subscribe button like   button notification bell and then i have this  image down at the bottom and you might be like   hold on i don't want that image down at the bottom  here because it's sort of weird here that with the   three sections in a row they all have no content  they all go and then the image that is meant to be   associated with the subscribe button and the issue  here is if you don't do anything else then LaTeX   is going to automatically position your fingers  in a nice place in the document opposed to maybe   exactly where you want it so i can fix this by  adding a parameter to the \begin{figure} something   i haven't talked about previously I'm going to go  and do in brackets the [h] command this parameter   h just means here there's other ones like [t]  which has the top of the page or [b] which is the   bottom of the page now if i recompile it with that  little extra bit there the button appears exactly   where i want let me copy everything and I'm going  to do basically the same thing for the like button   basically the same for the subscribe button but  I'm just going to turn to change the names okay   i think I've cleaned everything up let's compile  that and i believe i now have a subscribe button   looks nice a like button looks nice a notification  bell and then it appears in the middle of the page   now LaTeX is actually a little bit not liking of  this it gives me a bit of a view warning that says   maybe it'll be better to specify it as [ht]  which stands for here and top if possible it   doesn't like that and so i can come here on  that one since it seems to be causing a bit   of a problem and it will take this error message  away it's not going to display it because again   there's just no content on the next page so it's  just going to nicely put it in the middle just to   keep everything nice and centralized and what i  really like about it is that the enumeration like   figure 1.1 and 1.2 here these are which by the  way these are being enumerated at the level of   chapters right now it's just a coincidence that i  have one one image per section but they're being   enumerated at the level of chapters uh i might  want to have a lot of these in my document and   i want to keep track of them somehow so what  i can do is i can go back over here to main   and right underneath my table of contents i can go  \listofigures and if i do that it's going to have   this nice way to underneath so here's my list  of figures right there table of contents then   list of figures and you can see exactly where  they're going to be so this is very convenient   you can do the same kind of idea you could have a  list of tables or other different items and in a   long thesis having these organizational structural  components can just make it a lot nicer for you   or for the reader of your thesis to be able to  figure out what's going on all right we're doing   well uh i think i want to now turn to one of the  most interesting parts which is the bibliography   so I'm going to expand so i can see my list of  files one more time and what I'm going to do here   is i want to create a new file and I'm going to  call it my references but normally all of my files   have been .tex files I'm going to call this one  a .bib file for bibliography and bibliographies   are the one major part of a thesis they're just a  little bit different we're gonna have a different   type of file not a text file a .bib file so  I'm gonna create that and it appears down here   so if i go into this I'm actually just copying and  pasted from one i have found online I'm going to   copy and paste Einstein's special relativity paper  and what i want to notice is that your dot bib   file it doesn't impose the type of formatting the  file is just collecting information this is the   author this is the title this is the journal this  is the year and what that means is is that you're   not spending a whole bunch of time precisely  formatting exactly how your bibliography works   the way you might on Microsoft word where  you're like this has to be bolded and this   has to be underlined you're just collecting the  data here and there's a standard way to do this   now figuring out the exact syntax for how you  collect the data for making these bibliography   files is actually not going to be done in this  video but I'm going to put a detailed link from   overlink down in the description so you can see  exactly how to do this personally i actually think   that you shouldn't manually create your .bib files  because overleaf actually syncs with a number of   external bibliography software things like zotero  where you can be collecting all of the references   for your thesis in one spot and it's going to  make these bib files for you so I'm going to put   the information to that down in the description  and basically say go and figure out how to make   your bibliography files what i will cover though  is now that I've made this bibliography file   how do i actually put it back into my document  so as usual I'm going to go back to the main my   bibliography is going to be after my appendix here  and there's going to be two different components   to it the first thing is i need to specify the  style so I'm going to say \bibliographystyle   and you have a lot of options here because  bibliographies can be formatted in many different   ways there's many different styles and your  university may have a specific one that it wants   I'm just going to use a plain one because it's  just nice and i don't know not a plane without   an e at the end uh because it's just a nice and  simple so that just sets the style it's basically   saying how do you interpret that dot bib file to  display it nicely again there's lots of different   standards here then I'm going to say bibliography  and well there's only one bibliography file that   we have it's the one called reference so  my bibliography is this ref file I'm going   to compile that and let's see what we have now  there's one little thing which is when i go to   this it doesn't look like there's anything there  i mean if i go to my ref i had this reference for   einstein but there's nothing in the bibliography  and the reason is that i haven't used that   particular reference in my document so okay where  should i go let's go to the subscriber chapter say   and i don't know why in making youtube buttons  we would talk about special relativity but i can   reference say einstein and the way i do this is as  follows i go \cite and then notice that overleaf   is looking through your files here it says the  only thing you can really cite here is einstein   and i'm going oops i didn't mean to hit back  or the period there i'll put the period there   now when i compile it it will change in two  places the first thing here is that under   the bibliography i have used that einstein  bibliography reference and so there it is the   second thing is if i scroll back up to my chapter  2 see what happens i can reference einstein and   then it says a little one there one referring  to the fact that you've got a one down there   this is what is so nice about LaTeX everything  you just kept track of right as you change the   number of citations throughout your document  all of that enumeration will be completely   automatic everything will link up appropriately  and you'll be able to deal with your references   i want to show you one final really nice killer  feature about overleaf if you click this review   button and this is really just pretty special to  overleaf i'm going to go it says track changes   is off I'm going to click this toggle  and now track changes is going to be on   and so imagine i come along here and do something  and I'll get rid of that panel and let me imagine   i do something like i am going to expand  this now when you have this track changes on   you get to see what is the new thing that you are  doing right now as you're adding to your document   and indeed if i click on this review i  can come along and make a change like   for example one of your collaborators  can be like i think you should add this   and now you have the option to just choose do  you want to accept it or do you want to reject it   and so this is one of the killer features of  overleaf that allows to have multiple people   collaborating on the same document or even just  yourself you want to see what you've been doing   at your different iterations of writing and  allows you to track all those changes it's like   the history but on steroids all right the next  thing i want to talk about is how do we deal with   footnotes I'm going to make a new line over here  and i want to do a footnote right here okay so   let me say that i want to have something that  appears at the bottom of the page I'm going to go   backslash and I'm going to say \footnote i know  shocker and then i write in whatever it is this is   like i don't know this is my first  footnote very exciting okay let's run that   now i had to figure out where in our document  I'm going to be i believe i was in chapter   2 here so there it is i can reference einstein  I've done that first then it says i want to do   a footnote right here and you'll notice it says i  want to do a footnote right here it puts a little   bit of a one with different formatting than the  formatting for references again there are ways   to change all of these looks if you so wish  but this is how it's done it sort of natively   and then down at the bottom this is my first  footnote now if i have a really long footnote i   might not want to define it right in the middle of  some other sentence or it might be the case that i   want to refer to the same footnote multiple times  in a row and i can do that with something called   \footnotemark so i can use \footnote mark to  make a placeholder and not define it until later   then to define it later I'll do \footnotetext and  this is saying what is the text of that footnote   and i will say this is my second footnote and  let's see what happens when i do it i can use two   notice that there's a space here so it looks a  little bit weird i really prefer to have that   there so that the 2 is right on top of the use  that looks a little better now the now the 2 is   right beside the use but then i didn't define  it to later if i go down at the bottom this is   my first note footnote and this is my second  footnote and then if you want to have multiple   marks for the same footnote i can use this command  it's \footnotemark and then it goes inside of a   parameter it puts in \value{footnote} so it just  says put in the same reference basically that you   had before and if i do that now I'm going to get  that 2 twice so you see how there's i can use 2   and then until later 2 the same 2 is referred to  here and then it's defined to be whatever this   footnote text is now the final thing i want  to do is talk about how can i organize the   layout of the entire thesis things like margins on  the left and the right and the top and the bottom   as well as dealing with things like printing  so the first thing I'm going to do is go   back to the very beginning where it said document  class and i included a report but I'm going to put   inside of my square brackets that allows it to  feed into parameter I'm going to write [twoside]   and first of all i just think you should always be  printing your thesis two-sided just to save paper   and this just allows that to be done this way  to note that there's going to be two different   sides to this you could also use a spot to make  the font larger or smaller or you can add many   extra different parameters to this document  class here now i have to add a new package to   deal with margins I'm going to use the following  packets use packages called the geometry package and i can specify now all of my margins  within here so I'm going to copy and paste   uh something called new geometry and i specified  the top to be three quarters of an inch the bottom   to be three quarters of an inch in order to  be three quarters of lynch and the inner to be   specified as 1.5 inches this is also a spot  where you might want to change what type of   paper so for example it defaults to letter but if  you want a4 or legal you can specify all of this   with the geometry package now I'm going to do and  then I'm going to do one thing i haven't actually   written a lot of text anywhere so I'm going to  add a generic uh it's kind of a funny one that   people who use LaTeX a lot do it's called lipsum  and lipsum is just a package that has a generic   large amount of text I'll show you what i mean and  then I'm going to go down here \lipsum and then in   square brackets I'll write 1 to 20. so this is  just going to give the first i think 20 lines of   this let's see what it looks like well here's the  following it's just a whole bunch of i guess this   is latin text and this is just a trick to be able  to generate well a lot of text so you can sort of   see what it looks like now that i have a bunch of  text there this will be your actual content there   it nicely does this indenting of the first line  when it's trying to make paragraphs but notice the   difference i mean i I've now zoomed out so you can  see the whole thing notice how the margin on the   left is way smaller than the margin on the right  this despite the fact that if i go back to my main   tech file here and basically what's happened here  is that the i specified the outer margin to be   0.75 an inch and the inner margin to be 1.5 and  that's because i said it was two-sided so i want   when you put it two-sided together and you look  at it say it's been nicely binded into the book   that inner margin here will be 0.75 plus the other  0.75 to the 1.5 inches so basically on this page   this is going to be an inner margin that's going  to be an outer margin let's go down one page it's   exactly reversed outer margin and inner margin  this allows you to print it into some binded   document and on the columns will look really  nice the exact amounts of these margins please   do look up your university specifications here but  this geometry package allows you to control them   now there is a lot more that i can tell you  about and one of the things I've been doing   in this particular video and the previous ones is  not using a huge amount of packages packages are   all these little extra things that you can add  that give new functionality and so in the next   video I'm going to share with you a bunch of my  favorite packages that i use all the time that i   think can really superpower your LaTeX documents  and make them just awesome allow you to customize   so many of the different things and just make  it that much more pretty so that and more coming   up in the next video and if you enjoyed this one  please do give it a like for the youtube algorithm   if you have any questions or thoughts about  LaTeX leave them down in the comments below   all the links to many of the different topics  that I've talked about are down in the description   check out overleaf this is a long call to action  and we'll do some more math in the next video!

Channel: Dr. Trefor Bazett

Views: 101,376

Keywords: Solution, Example, math, how to write a thesis, write a thesis in latex, overleaf, Thesis acknowledgements, how to write an absract, thesis abstact, how to format bibliographies, bibtex, bibliography in latex, zotera, appendix, thesis, latex footnotes, references, citations, citations in latex, chapter, include, appendices, title page latex, thesis title page, thesis templates, latex thesis template, latex margins, latex twosided, tutorial, latex thesis title page

Id: zqQM66uAig0

Length: 30min 57sec (1857 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 26 2021