Writing a thesis in LaTeX

It’s that time: you’re finally thinking about writing your thesis. Well you’ve probably been thinking about it since the second you began your thesis, but now you’re actually thinking about the physical action of writing it. How will it look? What chapters will I need? How the heck am I going to write all those words?!

One thing that you may not be considering is what software to use to write it in. It’s a just a long document – so I’ll use Microsoft Word, right? The standard word processor for pretty much everyone. Wrong! In this post I am going to give you the pros and cons of an alternative – LaTeX (pronounced “lay-tech”).

I’m going to start off by being very honest. I hate Microsoft Word. I am a Mac user, but it’s not that. I’ve always struggled with Word. It’s always taken me a huge amount of fiddling to get anything near what I wanted, and I’ve never been totally happy with what I end up with. The thought of writing my entire thesis in Word made me almost vomit a little. (See? Brutally honest).

Luckily, I was working in a lab that had a ton of engineers, computer scientists and mathematicians. And they do things differently to us squishy biologist types. Someone casually mentioned this thing called “lay-tech” and then showed me a document they’d produced with it. It made my legs go a bit quivery. It was beautiful. The typesetting, the neatness, the simplicity. It even had equations in that looked NICE. Unheard of for Word. “How do I create such a thing?” I asked in awe.

Turns out, LaTeX is not like your average WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processor, like Word or Apple’s Pages. No. You write everything in plain text, and all the formatting comes from commands that you embed within that plain text. No more highlighting the bits you want in bold, no; just a simple \textbf{bold} is all you need. Italics? \textit{italics}. Job done.

Ok so admittedly that was not the best example to use… doing that for everything you want in bold or italics is actually a bit of a faff, and that is one of the easiest things to do in Word. But – images. This is where LaTeX excels.

You know when you’ve got everything sorted in Word just the way you like it, and then you drop an image in… and everything shifts. Your image decides to align itself to the very end of the page, or stick to the edge of some text, and all those lovely words that you put in the right places have just jumped around. So you fiddle about with it, many hours pass. You get it how you like it. You realise you need a second image – no problem! So you drop that in, and bang – it’s like someone literally shook up your computer and jumbled up all the text and images. The images are stuck on top of one another and won’t separate; or, they’re at the very top and very bottom of a page; or, the second image has completely replaced the first.

This scenario does not happen with LaTeX, which is fantastic for writing a thesis, or any academic document with plenty of figures. LaTeX has some magical typesetting and design algorithms which place the image in the location that it looks best on the page, closest to the actual place where you’ve inserted it. I’d say 95% of the time this works brilliantly – and in the other 5% of times where you really *need* the image to be in a certain place, there are workarounds to get past it.

And finding out about these workarounds is relatively easy. As with various coding languages, there is a fantastic online community of people ready to help out with LaTeX issues. The chances are that the solutions you’re looking for or the problem you’re facing has already been solved by someone – so just Google it and find out! And this is the kind of procrastination that is genuinely benefitting your thesis.

One of my favourite things about writing a thesis in LaTeX is the way the document is structured. You have a main file, which generates things like the title page, abstract, contents page… all that ‘extra’ stuff. And then each chapter is contained in a separate .tex file which links into that main file, which means that everything is separate and you don’t risk ruining everything by accidentally deleting everything in one document. I think there are fancy ways of linking files in Microsoft Word but I heard so many horror stories of them not working properly, I never wanted to find out…

In this main file you also set some of the overarching characteristics of the document – for example line spacing, the margin size, font size, what colour URLs should be, whether your work should be hyphenated or not, what your section and chapter titles should look like – all in this main document. So you want to know what your thesis would look like if all your chapter titles were in bright blue? You simply change one word in one command, and regenerate the document – it’s so easy. Don’t like it? Simply change it back. No need to go through each chapter and change it manually. This means that when you’re in the mood to and when time allows, you can tinker with the look of your thesis really easily.

That’s the whole philosophy of LaTeX – you focus on the content, and it handles the presentation. Yeah, it requires a bit of work beforehand to learn the commands, but really it is very simple and quite self explanatory, and really easy to pick up. If you’re a Word whizz and are comfortable using that, then absolutely knock yourself out – but if you’ve always found it less than perfect and a bit frustrating, I’d seriously recommend giving LaTeX a go. I tried it first on some shorter documents in the very early stages of PhD, so I was learning it ahead of the all-important thesis production, which worked well for me.

There are plenty of LaTeX thesis templates and tips out there: here and here and here. And the LaTeX Wiki is invaluable. Yes, it has its own foibles – depending on what software you use to run it there’s no spellcheck, for example, and you can become super distracted playing with the layout and presentation because it’s so easy to do – but for me, the benefits seriously outweighed the negatives.

Writing my thesis was a really fun and rewarding experience because of LaTeX – and that’s something I never thought possible!