Tue, 21/May/2013 23:14

As I was writing my dissertation, there was no simple way to meet the Graduate School request for formatting an electronic thesis/dissertation (ETD) at Montana State University (MSU). I started by fitting together something that Prof. Steve Shaw and his grad students had written which was in turn based on a Georgia Tech style guide among other things. This yielded moderate results so I stepped on their shoulders to see farther and made my own.

After I graduated I thought it good to give back to the community, especially to other grad students. Thus, I decided to maintain the style guide as needed. I hope this works as a function to disseminate this guide to everyone. 

This LaTeX style guide works to meet requirements for either a dissertation (default option) or a thesis.

 

Last updated 09-May-2012

I changed the style guide to adjust for spacing after sections, and chapter. I added underlining of section numbers, subsection, etc. I didn't know these were an issue and have updated them.

I also removed the requirement of the subfigure package which is depricated. It uses the subfig package instead. This means you will have to use the subfloat command instead of the subfigure command.

This works well if you only have two pages of the ToC, LoT, and LoF. If there are more, you will need to use the old method. See the bottom of the Table of Contents -- Continued page or the Readme.txt file for details.

 There are a few issues with the placement of titles on the table of contents, list of figures, and list of tables pages. I am trying to find a solution to this. It is due to the fact that in order to add the "-- continued" to those pages a header is inserted. However, this header is blank but still present on the original pages. This is a tricky situation but am trying to find a work around. anyone have any ideas?

 

Good News!! 19-Jun-2010

  Thanks to user Andrew Slaughter and his alertness, I was able to implement a way to automatically add the "-- Continued" to the table of contents, list of tables, etc. No longer is there a need to use the "\nofiles" switch and edit latex files. This is great!

 

Below are the files needed. Instructions are in the .cls file, the .tex file and the READme.txt.

MSUstyle.cls 

MYmsuETD.tex

plunsrt_url.bst

My favorite bibliography style or for those in Environmental Sciences, Rebecca Taylor suggests this bibliography style.

Example files all zipped with everything here MSU_LaTeX_seth.zip

Example dissertation output MYmsuETD_output.pdf

 

Below are a few pages of tips and tricks.

Please leave comments on successes you have had and information about how to get it to work for you.

Comments:

Posted by Laura on
Seth -
Thanks for keeping this going. The DGE appreciates all you have done!

Laura
Posted by Laura on
Just an FYI for people using this style guide, our office has officially changed it's name to "The Graduate School" - (we are no longer the Division of Graduate Education). You might want to update accordingly.

Thanks,
Laura
Posted by darren on
To fix the header spacing issue on the table of contents I commented out lines 877 and 878 of the template and placed following line in front of the section that generated the second page of the table:

\addtocontents{toc}{\protect\chapter*{TABLE OF CONTENTS - CONTINUED}}

You can do the same thing for the list of figures, list of tables, etc. It's not as nice as having something right there in the template, but this will fix the problem for now. There's a few other issues with the formatting, but they are pretty straightforward to fix.
Posted by Laura on
For students graduating AFTER summer 2012 (after the July 16, 2012 thesis/dissertation deadline). Please note that the APPROVAL page ii should now have Dr. Ronald W. Larsen approving for the Graduate School (remove Carl A. Fox)
Thank you,
The Graduate School
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