Welcome to the thesis template info page

What is this about?

Even though LaTex is quite old is a very handy tool to create great looking texts, especially when they contain formulas. Nowadays there are lots of front-ends helping you out as long as you do not know every shortcut for symbols and structurization by heart. Furthermore is a lot more stable than WYSWYG text editors. By providing this template I want to facilitate getting started with writing your Bachelors thesis in LaTex. (The template is designed for BSc, Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrck but those are only defaults and you can easily suite it to your needs by changing the corresponding variables in the .tex file)

How do I get started?

OK, it's as simple as this: Enter thesis title, yours and the supervisors names and watch your bachelors thesis being generated. (no warrantyy, but almost like this ;-)
Actually there is not much more to say; just have a look at the .ps or .pdf file generated from the template, it contains some more advise how to adopt it to your needs. In case you never used LaTex before you might want to have a look at the various online tutorials in parallel. (For example this one, German)
If you like the style you can download all you need from this .zip file.
Depending on your latex distribution you might additionally need the file fancyhdr.sty, available throughout the net (Package description, German).

Adding Images

When using the graphicx package (already included in the header of the template) different image formats can be inserted, but actually I recommend to use only encapsulated postscript files (eps). Some programs generate such files automatically for you (e.g. the "griddata.eps" included in the .zip-file), but the results are achieved when you use postscript to draw. To convert other image formats to encapsulated postscript The GIMP is quite handy.
Please have a look at the postscript image example.ps (in some viewers you will have to scroll down) and then open the file with a plain text editor again. Note that the whole image is drawn from the declarative instructions in that file; scroll to the very end of the text and you will find the calls, before that lots of functions (e.g. /mybox, /mycaret) are defined. There are many comments in the plain text. A first hint: All operators are postfix! Detailed instructions online, e.g. here.
To convert such a postscript file to eps use "ps2epsi xyz.ps xyz.eps", the ps2epsi tool comes with every GhostScript distribution.
Should you have some data that you want to visualize: The free GnuPlot can produce fancy 2/3D plots for you. I found the information provided here to be quite helpful.
If you are on a linux system, you might want to produce fig output (set terminal fig). Then typing xfig in the shell allows you to edit the plot on a component basis. Of course xfig is also a good alternative to writing declarative postscript code. When finished xfig allows you to export to encapsulated postscript.