Department of Computer Science | Institute of Theoretical Computer Science

CADMO - Center for Algorithms, Discrete Mathematics and Optimization

Typesetting and Style

Despite the generic title, this page actually discusses typesetting with LaTeX. It is rather difficult to get anywhere near LaTeX's standards of quality with any other package, especially when it comes to mathematical or technical documents, so we strongly recommend it for your thesis.

Choosing an Editor

While any text editor will do, you should find one that has special LaTeX support, such as syntax highlighting and macro completion. There are two main options we recommend. One is to use Overleaf, an online service for which ETH also grants you premium access. As with all online services, it is good to frequently keep backups (for example if the service is down near your submission deadline). One downside of Overleaf is that it is as of the time of this writing impossible to do cross-file searches. For this reason, you might consider splitting your LaTeX code to only few files, if not one.
The other one is to use VScode along with the LaTeX workshop extension (obtainable via the extensions tab in VScode).
An important step in setting up the extension is to modify the compilation recipe used. In particular, keep only the pdflatex -> bibtex -> pdflatex * 2 recipe.
For both options, a useful tool is synctex (already included). This allows you to jump to the pdf location of a given source code line and vice versa. For Overleaf one simply has to double click on a passage (code or pdf). For the LaTeX workshop, ctrl+click goes from pdf to code and ctrl+alt+j goes from code to pdf.

Getting LaTeX

If you don't only use Overleaf, you will also need to install LaTeX on your system. Depending on your operating system, we recommend the following:

Yes, TeX is that big. Most of it is actually font data. You can in some cases get a stripped down distribution that omits some packages and fonts (by e.g. replacing texlive-full with texlive, texlive-extra, texlive-science, etc.)

Thesis Template

We recommend that you use our thesis template. It supplies most of the basic structure required for a thesis, includes a lot of comments about the packages used, contains some tips about typesetting math and should get you started very quickly.

Learning LaTeX

Finally, you'll have to learn the language. Tobias Oetiker et al., The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX, is a good starting point. Next, since you'll presumably use a lot of math, read the AMS documentation which describes some of the most used equation layouts. The AMS packages are always distributed with LaTeX.
Between these two, you should be able to start writing your thesis. The following documents will prove useful as you proceed:

Style and Art

Further reading

These may not have a direct relevance to your thesis, but it still good to know about them.

Questions and Feedback

Please contact Kostas Lakis if you have any questions, feedback or corrections.