Choosing a thesis template

Does your university already provide one?

Check first. Many departments publish a LaTeX class, and where one exists it is almost always the right answer — it encodes the regulations, it is what your examiners expect to see, and using it means formatting disputes are somebody else's problem. Look at the graduate school pages, ask your supervisor, and ask a student a year ahead of you, who will know whether the official one actually works.

A word of caution about templates named after universities, including some in this catalogue: many are community reconstructions rather than official releases, and regulations change. Treat any such template as a strong starting point that still needs checking against the current rules, not as a guarantee of compliance.

What actually matters in a thesis template

Most templates look fine on the first page. The differences that matter appear in month four, so these are the things to test before you commit.

Front matter

A thesis has more structured preliminary material than any other document: title page, declaration of originality, abstract, acknowledgements, table of contents, list of figures, list of tables, sometimes a list of abbreviations, a nomenclature section and a dedication. The order is frequently mandated.

A good template gives you all of these as commands you fill in, and handles the page numbering convention — roman numerals for the front matter, arabic from the first chapter — without you thinking about it. Check that it does. Retrofitting front matter into a template that assumed an article is genuinely tedious.

Two-sided printing

If your thesis will be bound, it will probably be printed two-sided, and that changes the layout: margins become asymmetric so the inner edge has room for the binding, chapters start on right-hand pages, and headers alternate. This is what the twoside andopenright class options do.

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper,twoside,openright]{report}

Switching this on late is not a one-line change in practice — it shifts every page and can expose overfull lines and badly placed figures throughout. Decide early, and if you are unsure, work intwoside from the start.

Chapter structure

Theses use \chapter, which means the underlying class isreport, book, memoir, KOMA-Script'sscrbook, or a custom class built on one of them. Anarticle-based template has no chapters and is the wrong starting point regardless of how good it looks.

Equally important: does the template split chapters into separate files? Over a few hundred pages you want\include{chapters/introduction} rather than one enormous file — it keeps the editor responsive, makes version control legible, and lets you compile a single chapter while drafting.

Bibliography

Your field's citation style decides this, and it is the single most common source of late-stage pain. Check which system the template uses — BibTeX or the newer biblatex/biber — and whether the style it produces is the one your department requires. Changing bibliography system late means re-running a different tool chain and often re-checking every citation. The bibliography guide covers how to tell which one you have and how to choose.

Does it compile, unmodified, today?

The most practical test, and the one people skip. Download it, compile it untouched, and see. A template that needs a package your distribution does not have, or that was written for an engine you are not running, is a problem you will otherwise discover while trying to write.

Every template in this catalogue is compiled before it is published and the rendered first page shown on its page is the real output, so this particular failure mode is already ruled out here.

Thesis templates that compile

There are 78 in the theses category. A representative selection:

A sensible order of operations

1. Read the regulations. Write down the mandated margins, spacing, font size and front-matter order.
2. Use the official class if there is one. Stop here if so.
3. Otherwise pick a template that is chapter-based, has the front matter you need, and uses the bibliography system your field expects.
4. Compile it unmodified before writing a word.
5. Set two-sided and margins to match the regulations now, not later.
6. Write a throwaway chapter with a figure, a table, an equation and three citations, and compile again. This exercises everything that breaks.
7. Put it in version control and keep going.

Three questions people ask after they have started

Can I change the template later? Partly. Fonts, colours, heading style and the title page are cosmetic and can be changed at any point. Swapping the document class is different: it changes which commands exist, so a template that gave you\declaration or \keywords may have no equivalent elsewhere, and the front matter has to be rebuilt by hand. Changing bibliography system is similar. Treat class, engine and bibliography as decisions, and everything else as adjustable.

My university gave me a Word template. Can I still use LaTeX? Usually yes, as long as the finished PDF meets the formatting rules — most regulations specify the output, not the tool. The exception is where you must submit an editable source file, or where a department genuinely requires tracked changes in review. Ask before you are three chapters in.

Should I use the fanciest template I can find? No. An examiner is reading for the argument, and an unconventional layout mostly creates opportunities to violate a regulation. The templates that survive a thesis are the ones that are conservative, well-documented and structured for length. Save the typographic ambition for the parts that are actually yours — the figures.

Things worth deciding early

• Which engine. If you need a specific font or a non-Latin script you need XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX; otherwise pdfLaTeX is fine. Seethe engine comparison.
• Where your references live. One .bib file, exported from your reference manager, kept in the repository.
• How figures are produced. Vector PDF wherever possible; a 300 dpi raster that looked fine on screen will not survive printing.
• Backups. Version control, remote, from day one. This is the advice nobody regrets taking.

What not to worry about

Fine typographic control, a bespoke title page, and the exact appearance of chapter headings are all easy to change later and do not affect the structure of your document. Spending the first week making the template beautiful is the most common way to spend a week not writing a thesis. The decisions that are expensive to reverse are the class, the bibliography system, the engine and the one-sided/two-sided choice — settle those, then write.