Back in 1996,
The Ohio State University Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department made available
LaTeX2e support files including a document class that complied with the graduate school's format for dissertations (see
samples pages,
guidelines,
templates, and
other resources from the
graduate school). The resulting
osudissert96.cls and
osudissert96-mods.sty from the ECE department was kept up to date through 1998, but it was left to lapse out of compliance after several format updates from the graduate school (including a recent one in 2009). Additionally, the graduate school only officially supports helping students with documents "typeset" in Microsoft Word (and even their Word templates may require a more recent version than they claim on the website).
So back when I put together
my dissertation (which has
source code available to review) in 2010, I updated those old ECE templates for the 2010 format. I tried to make them backward compatible with the old
osudissert96 to make them nice drop-in replacements for anyone using the outdated versions. You can find them at:
For the most part, the old
osudissert96 documentation still applies. However, it might be better just browsing through the sample and/or using the sample as a template for your own document. To get the sample up and running,
- Unzip sample-osudissert10.zip.
- Unzip osudissert10.zip.
- Put the CLS and STY files from osudissert10.zip into the same directory as the files from sample-osudissert10.zip
- Build the sample dissertation with:
- pdflatex Thesis.tex
- bibtex Thesis.aux
- pdflatex Thesis.tex
- pdflatex Thesis.tex
- Review the resulting Thesis.pdf file, which also includes documentation on how to get your own dissertation up and running.
There is also a README file in sample-osudissert10.zip that basically says the same as above. Experts may just need the files in
osudissert10.zip, but it will still be useful to see the quick reference in Appendix B of the sample dissertation. Note that the documentclass is still called
osudissert96.cls even though the zip file is called osudissert10.zip; this choice was made for compatibility with old dissertations using the old files.
I hope that helps someone out there. I probably won't be monitoring the graduate school format policies now that I am not in graduate school anymore, but I am usually happy to help with "how-to-modify" questions over e-mail (if I have time). Good luck!
