A LyX Thesis Layout for UNSW Theses

LyX and LateX

For the uninitiated, LyX is a front-end for LaTeX, a command-line driven typesetting system that produces beautiful looking documents. The front-end provided by LyX alleviates some of the more arcane and tedious aspects of working with pure LaTeX. You can use LyX without knowing any LaTeX (although you do have to install it) and still get great results.

The LyX GUI lets you write in a manner similar to a word processor, using buttons, menus or key shortcuts to layout and format your text while giving you a preview of what it looks like. When you’re ready to print or submit your work, LyX translates what is on the screen into LaTeX code and then hands it off to the LaTeX system to do all the heavy typesetting, resulting in a beautifully rendered PDF.

I’ve written an undergraduate thesis and several conference papers in pure LaTeX and a PhD using LyX. For me, LyX wins hands down as many LaTeX annoyances such as forgetting to close environments, including figures, managing citations and dealing with tables become much easier in LyX. This results in more time writing and less time tracking down compile bugs.

For a gentle introduction to LyX, I’d recommend having a look at the Structured Writing with LyX article (even though it’s a little out of date) and the Tutorials section of the excellent LyX wiki.

The Layout File

Much of the presentation of your document that is normally configured through LaTeX commands can be managed through LyX layout files. A layout defines the various styles and blocks (such as titles, headings, author details, code, etc.), how they will appear on screen in LyX and how they are to be translated to LaTeX.

This is not a tutorial on writing LyX layouts but if you are curious about how this stuff works a good place to start is Section 5.2 of the Customization document that can be found in LyX’s Help menu.

To make the UNSW thesis layout file easier to use I embedded the LaTeX mark-up commands into the preamble of the LyX layout file. I realise the “correct” way to do this sort of thing is to write a LaTeX class file (e.g., unswthesis.cls) and create a corresponding layout file (e.g., unswthesis.layout) that references its commands. However, I thought it would be easier for LyX and LaTeX newcomers to only have to deal with a single file and not have to worry about fiddling with their LaTeX configuration too much.

Installing the Layout File

Download the following layout file and save it to the layout section LyX configuration directory. This is usually in Library/Application Support/LyX-1.5/layouts/ relative to your home directory.

• unswthesis.layout - 10KB LyX Layout File

Now open LyX and select LyX > Reconfigure from the menu. LyX will then ask you to restart. Once this is done the thesis layout should be installed and visible in the Document Class field of window opened via the Document > Settings... menu.

For this layout to work correctly, you will also need an image of the UNSW crest. I found a black and white PDF one that works nicely with this layout. You can download it here:

• unswcrest.pdf - 74KB PDF File

This file needs to be in the same folder as the LyX document using the thesis layout.

Using the Layout File

Once you have LyX restarted, open a new document and then go to Document > Settings... and then select “UNSW Thesis” from the document class list and hit OK.

This layout has all of the usual styles found in the Book class. Two of them, Author and Title, are used to control what is displayed on your thesis title page. In your new document, add a title using the Title style and put your name underneath in the Author style.

Save the document in the same directory as the unswcrest.pdf file and then turn it into a PDF document via the View > PDF (pdflatex) menu option. If all goes well you should see something like the following:

Note: As this layout makes use of the graphicx package (found in most LaTeX distributions) and a PDF version of the UNSW crest only the pdflatex view will work.

Templates

It makes sense to split a thesis-sized document into several manageable chunks. This allows you to work on each chunk in isolation, making it easier to zoom around your document and examine the final output without having to build the entire thesis.

I used a separate LyX document for each chapter and appendix and a “main” file to draw them all together when I needed to inspect the entire thesis.

The zip file below has everything you need to get started, including:

• unswthesis.layout - The layout file described above.
• unswcrest.pdf - The UNSW crest described above.
• main.lyx - The main template used to build the whole thesis.
• chapter.lyx - An example chapter that is included by the main.lyx file.
• example.bib - An example BibTeX file that is included by the main template.
• copyright.tex - A LaTeX file that is used by the main.lyx template to add the required copyright statement to the beginning of your thesis.
• originality.tex - Another LaTeX file that is included by main.lyx and required by UNSW.

You can download the lot here:

• unswthesis.zip - 34KB Zip File

Just unzip the directory somewhere convenient and copy the unswthesis.layout file to your LyX directory as described eariler. Then open the main.lyx file with LyX and you should be able to create a PDF from it using View > PDF (pdflatex) straight away. After that, just use the File > New from Template... menu item to open the chapter.lyx document as a template, replace the text with your thesis chapter and save it. To add your chapter to the main.lyx document use the Insert > File > Child Document... menu to add it.

Happy writing!

Caveats

I originally started writing my thesis using LyX 1.3. Since then LyX has gone from strength to strength and is now up to version 1.5. The files here have all been adapted and improved from the LyX 1.3 versions I originally used and tested using LyX 1.5.1.

I’ve also only tried this on the Mac version of LyX 1.5 using teTeX as the LaTeX system under the hood, though there’s no reason things shouldn’t work with something like MacTeX instead. The only thing I’m not too sure about is whether there are any packages that I use in this layout that don’t come with a standard LaTeX distribution. Let me know if you have any problems.

Also, the format of the title page, margins, declarations, and so on met the submission guidelines for UNSW as of July 2006. You may want to check if they’re still valid. If not, a quick poke around in the files and it should be apparent where to make any changes.

Acknowledgements

Most of the code for formatting the thesis title page comes from a LaTeX class file I found on CTAN as does the formatting for the copyright.tex and originality.tex files. Thanks to Stephen Harker for making these available.

The LyX image in this post is thanks to the LyX page at the Linux Guiden wiki.