Editing LaTeX Dissertation Formatting Tips (section)

== Using the <code>Memoir</code> Package ==

I use the [https://ctan.org/pkg/memoir <code>memoir</code>] LaTeX package to format my dissertation as a book. You may have encountered <code>memoir</code> before if you’ve used the latex templates in the <code>cdsc_tex</code> repository that [[User:Mako|Mako]] maintains. Memoir really shines for book length projects such as your dissertation, and like a book, it is aware of when pages are on the right or the left side of the book. It comes with some attractive formatting styles, creates a fancy table of contents and lets you insert section-specific bibliographies.

Following the required front matter, my dissertation opens like an academic book, with a table of contents, a list of tables and a list of figures. Memoir generates these automatically with the spell:

<pre>\tableofcontents
\listoffigures
\listoftables</pre>
Following these tables and lists, I have an “Acknowledgments” section and a “Dedication.” I created these with the <code>\chapter*</code> command. <code>\chapter</code> starts a new chapter on the next right-hand page and adds the chapter to the table of contents. <code>\chapter*</code> does the same, but leaves the chapter out of the table of contents. I also used <code>\chapter*</code> to insert prefaces for each chapter that note if the chapter is published, has been presented and credit my collaborators.

=== Converting Articles into <code>Memoir</code> Chapters ===

As described above, I used the <code>\input</code> command to insert a <code>.tex</code> file for chapter into the main document. Each stand-alone article has its own LaTeX preamble, which begins with a <code>\documentclass</code> command and ends with <code>\begin{document}.</code> Since I built my dissertation as a single document, I stripped the preambles from each chapter file and added any dependencies from any of my projects to the preamble of the main file (<code>ETD_version.tex</code>). I also removed <code>\end{document}</code> and <code>\printbibliography</code> commands from the end of the file.

Finally, chapters don’t normally have abstracts, and the <code>\abstract</code> command doesn’t work to insert an abstract in each chapter. Fortunately, you can use the <code>\chapterprecishere</code> command provided by <code>memoir</code> to insert an abstract at the beginning of the chapters.

=== References ===

Normally, a dissertation or other book-length project has a single bibliography at the end. So even though your articles will have their own bibliographies, you’ll want to consolidate them. Fortunately, LaTeX will do this be default. You’ll just need a single <code>\printbibliography</code> command after your last chapter.

To help show off all the work I did during my PhD that’s related to my dissertation project, I included some papers as appendices. Since these were stand-alone papers that weren’t really part of the dissertation, I printed separate bibliographies for each using the <code>\refsection</code> command. Putting an appendix in a separate <code>\refsection</code> makes <code>\printbibliography</code> print only the citations that were used within the appendix.

I didn’t bother creating a new <code>.bib</code> file for the dissertation. I just added symbolic links to the <code>.bib</code> files for my different articles to the project and used the <code>\addbibresource</code> command. I get a lot of <code>Duplicate entry key</code> warnings from <code>biblatex</code> this way, but it’s doesn’t affect the <code>.pdf</code> output.