in this tutorial series we’re going to teach you how to write a basic thesis using latex we’re going to be using share latex as our later editor but you could use whichever editor you feel most confident with if you’ve never used latex before you may want to first watch our beginners latex tutorial series which you can find on our channel your thesis could be the longest and most complicated documents you’ll ever write which is why it’s such a good idea to use latex instead of a common word processor latex tasks that the difficult and awkward in word processors far simpler to get started will open up a blank project when writing something like a thesis it’s worth splitting up the documents into multiple tech files it’s also wise to organize the project using folders in this example we’ll create two new folders one for all the images used in the project and one for all the tech files making up the main body of the thesis now let’s return to our main tech file this is the root document and is the tech file that will draw the whole document together the first thing we need to choose is a document class the article class isn’t designed for writing long documents like a thesis so we’ll choose the report class we’ll also change the font size by adding square brackets into the document class command and specifying 12-point let’s also prepare the document for images by loading the graphics package we’ll also need to tell latex where to look for the images using the graphics path command as we’re storing them in a separate folder now let’s fill in the title author and date information notice that I’m adding the thesis title institution name and institution logo all into the title command this isn’t the best way to alter the title page so we’ll look at more elaborate ways of customizing the title page later on in the series but this will suffice for now after the title page we will need to add in an abstract dedication declaration and acknowledgement section we’ll add each of these in on separate pages using unnumbered chapters to do this we use the chapter command and add an Asterix you after these sections we’ll add a table of contents using the table of contents command now for the main body of the document in my example I will add five chapters in one of which will be an introduction and another will be a conclusion however instead of just composing these chapters in this tech file I will create a separate tech file for each chapter in the chapters folder we can then fill in these chapters with text remembering to split them up into sections and subsections you then to add these chapters into the document we use the input command in the root document remember to add in chapters forward slash before the file name so that latex knows where to find it I will now add in an appendix at the end of the document to do this use the appendix command to tell latex that what follows are appendices we still need to declare a new chapter using the chapter command despite having used the appendix command again will write the appendix in a separate file and then input it you if I now compile the document you will see all my chapters have been added to the document and a table of contents has been automatically generated this concludes the first part of the series in the next video we’ll look at using the fancy header package to configure headers and we’ll also use the geometry package to change the page layout please do subscribe to our channel to keep up to date
