Many students choose to write their senior thesis, captsone report, masters thesis, or PhD dissertation in LaTeX. To facilitate this we have created a document class (BYUPhys.cls) that encapsulates the basic format of a thesis and a template document that demonstrates how to use this class. The class has options for producing a senior, honors, or masters thesis as well as a PhD dissertation. To test it out, create a new folder and unzip the following files into the folder
The file 'template.tex' has quite a few comments to help you understand how it works. If you compile 'template.tex' using pdflatex, you should get the following output:
For longer documents, it is often nice to split the document into several files using the \include command. The following example shows you how to do this, and also illustrates the use of a bibliography management tool called BibTex.
Learning LaTeX
There are some excellent tutorials available for learning LaTeX, so we won't try to recreate one here. You might start with one of the documents listed at //www.latex-project.org/guides/, or you can do a web search for "latex tutorial" and you will find many excellent introductory documents. Take the time to read an online tutorial about LaTeX. If you get stuck, ask around for help. There are a number of students and professors that are familiar with LaTeX and can help you with the basics.
If you have questions about getting the template to run correctly or think you have found a bug, you can email Michael Ware about the problem.