The UCLA Thesis Style for LaTeX

LaTeX is my text formatting program of choice. Since I wanted to graduate (or maybe to avoid doing so), I took over maintenance of the UCLA Thesis document style. This document style is based on work from Leslie Lamport, Dorab Patel, Eduardo Krell, Richard B. Wales, and John Heidemann.

Since I've now graduated and left UCLA I am no longer able to maintain this document style. I put together a post-final release (1.2) in June 1996. If someone else is interested in taking over maintenence, please contact me.

Two versions are available: The older version (104KB, tar.gz, no longer actively maintained) for LaTeX 2.09, and a new version (180KB, tar.gz) for LaTeX2e. Both versions include an user's guide written by Rich Wales.

Many people have gotten degrees with versions of this package, including (according to their self-reports): John Heidemann (MS and PhD, CS, 1991 and 1995), Ashvin Goel (MS, CS, 1996), Geoff Kuenning (PhD, CS, 1997), David Ratner (MS and PhD, CS, 1995 and 1998), Bill Faust (PhD, EE), Ted Kim (MS and PhD, CS, 1995 and 1998?), Patrick Madden (PhD, CS), Marcio G. Siqueira (PhD, EE), Steve Vincena (PhD, physics), Joseph N.Q. Pham (PhD, EE), David Kan (PhD, math, 1999), Sylvia Lin (MS, EE, 1999), Kirill Shtengel (PhD, physics, 1999), Yoichiro Miyamoto (MS?, EE, 1999?), Jonathan Fredrick (MS, EE, 2000), Andrew Knightly (Math, 2000), S.J. Lee (PhD, CS, 2000), Doreen DeLeon (PhD, Math, 2000), Chris Mitchell (PhD, physics, 2001), David Sherman (PhD, math, 2001), Verner Thorsmølle (PhD, physics, 2001), Scott Desposato (PhD, political science, 2001), Lance Menthe (PhD, physics, 2001), Tara Drozdenko (PhD, physics, 2000), Roya Zandi (PhD, physics, 2001), Albert Cortez (PhD, math, 2001), Matt Griskey (PhD, physics and astronomy, 2002), Matthew Fong (MS, EE, 2002), Scott Seongwook Lee (PhD, CS, 2002), David Gabriel, Nirupama Bulusu (PhD, CS, 2002), Jonathan Fredrick (MS, EE; and PhD, EE, 2002), Vijay Raghunathan (MS, EE, 2002), Gregory Johnson (PhD, Nuclear Engineering, 2002), Robert Bell (PhD, Geography, 2003), Jeremy Elson (PhD, CS, 2003), Michael J. Pan (MA, Architecture, 2003), Beichuan Zhang (PhD, CS, 2003), Greg Prier (MS, CS, 2003), Vladimir Bychkovsky (MS, CS, 2003), Ignacio Thayer (MS, CS, 2003), Lukas Mandrake (PhD, physics, 2002), Dongwon Lee (PhD, CS, 2002), Fan Ye (PhD, CS, 2004), Chris Staecker (PhD, Math, 2005), Tohru Ohnuki (PhD, physics, 2005), David Gabriel (PhD, comparative literature, 2005), John Hernlund (PhD, geophysics and space sciences, 2005), Ling-Jyh Chen (PhD, CS, 2005), Elizabeth Bruch (PhD, sociology, 2006), Arun Agrahara Somasundara (PhD, EE, 2005), Chikako Yamauchi (PhD, Economics, 2005), Richard Wang (PhD?, Math, 2005), N. V. Krishna (PhD, CS, 2005), William Elmer (MS, Civil Eng., 2006), Juhani Linnainmaa (PhD, finance, 2006), Doug McKee (PhD, economics, 2006), Athanasios Stathopoulos (PhD, CS, 2006), Vijay Raghunathan (PhD, EE, 2006), Heemin Park (PhD, EE, 2006), Carin Siegerman (PhD, biomedical engineering, 2007), Seth Bouvier (PhD, Neuroscience, 2007), Morgan Beeby (PhD, biochemestry and molecular biology, 2007), Matthew Barczys (PhD, astronomy, 2007), Nikitas Liogkas (PhD, CS, 2008), S. Alex Smith (PhD?, math, 2008), Ahmad Fattahi (PhD, EE, 2008), Ali Parsa (PhD, EE, 2008), Rolf Campos (PhD, economics, 2008), Rodney Chandler (MS, EE, 2008), Alessandro Warth (PhD, CS, 2009), Thomas Schmid (PhD, EE, 2009), Eren Eraslan (MS, EE, 2010), Roy Shea (PhD, CS, 2010), and Ian Craig (PhD, Chemistry, 2010),

Also, some non-UCLA folks: Laurentiu B. Cristofor (PhD CS, 2002, UMass-Boston) made some mods for his school; Marcelo H. T. Martins (MS, Communications Eng., U.~Tokyo, 2009). A couple people have contacted me when starting their degrees, but I never heard if they finished: Andy Schwartz (Physics), Alon Barlevy (EE). Remember to let me know if you format your thesis with this style.

Comments From Users

From Lance Menthe:

It was accepted easily with no issues whatsoever. I am told I had one of the easiest times with the thesis advisor. Thank you SO MUCH for maintaining this file. I think you saved me months of work (I did not know TeX at all before I began writing my dissertation.)

Bugs, desired features, and changes

Unfortunately uclathes does not have a maintainer right now, but I will collect bugs and desired features here.

From David Sherman (2001):

To avoid printing vacuous lists of tables and figures [i.e., if you don't have any in your thesis], I placed % just before \@figurestrue and \@tablestrue

According to Michael Pan (2003), ``I met with the thesis advisor today, and she noted one thing that needed to be changed about the template-while footnotes can be single spaced, the spacing between footnote entries need to be double spaced.'' He recommends applying this patch (uclathes-1.2-footnote.patch) to change that.

Also I think from Michael Pan (2003): The thesis/dissertaion advisor told me that figure captions no longer need to be double spaced. In fact, she recommended I make them single spaced. By setting baselinestretch to one before the figure caption (and back to the original value after). [Another approach: use the doublespace package in LaTeX2e. -johnh] This works fine for the figures that appear in the text, but the captions in the "list of figures" in the intro pages are still double spaced.

Tohru Ohnuki (2005) added a file to report the margins; see the comments at the head for a description about how to use it.

Chris Staecker (2005) told me that the margin lady doesn't like lists of tables or lists of figures that are empty (if you have no tables or figures). Fix: find in the style file where to comment out the code that generates these lists (see the comment from David Sherman above for what to look for). Alternative fix: didn't you really want to add that figure or table? :-)

Elizabeth Bruch (2006), reports getting the error message: \newblock undefined when using the natbib package. (This error didn't happen for me.) Her work-around: add \def\newblock{\hskip .11em plus .33em minus .07em}.

Doug McKee (2006) warns: "Most installations of pdflatex default to A4 paper and most pdf readers will automatically scale the document to fit 8.5x11 making the margins rather larger than the margin lady would like.  Printing the A4 document without scaling results in a bottom margin that is way too small.  She said she gets lots of people coming in that don't realize this and don't know what to do about it when she points it out. " His suggested fix: Just adding "\setlength{\pdfpagewidth}{8.5in}" and "\setlength {\pdfpageheight}{11in}" to the beginning of my document solved this problem. Roy Shea (2010) provides this change as a patch to the class file. My suggested fix: Fix your TeX configuration (as descrbibed on my web page).

Ian Craig (2010) had a similar comment: "I was using the editor TeXnicCenter and for some reason it overrode the 'letter' setting under MikTeX and rendered the document as A4...[so I ended up with] 450 pages of archival quality scratch paper". Please note this is a problem with his TeX environment, not the class file. But I would take the moral as always check paper size.

Tom Kemeny reports (Nov. 2008) that:

`One thing I'm curious about is the use of the \appendix command. I have been using it in my standalone chapters done in LaTeX, but when I try to use it in the UCLA thesis document style, it for some reason numbers the appendix ".1."

Use the /appendix macro, then start a new chapter, i.e.: \appendix \chapter{My Appendix}

Roy Shea (2010) reports:

I used the listings package to include code within my dissertation as actual listings, rather than embedding code in a figure or table. A naming conflict between variables used to set up the table of contents in the UCLA thesis style and the listings package causes problems when setting a title for a list of listings within the table of contents. Attached is a patch (an ugly hack) for listings.sty 1.4 that prevents this naming conflict.