Unofficial template for making a Final Year Project (FYP) at Brunel University. This is still a work-in-progress
(WIP) and may require a little bit of configuring in order to get it to fully function.
You'll need a TeX system installed
I used these on my Windows 7
installation:
- TexMaker (Basically this is your TeX IDE where you'll write up your report)
- MiKTeX (You'll need a TeX engine to be able to compile your
.tex
documents)- BibTex (Part of MiKTeX)
- PdfLaTeX (Part of MiKTeX)
- JabRef (A very good program to handle the
biblio.bib
file so you can easily manage your references) - Python (Some scripts and packages will require Python to be installed)
- Pygments (A Python script that is required by the
minted
package so that you can import source code that will be automatically coloured in) - TexCount (A Perl script that is required to perform the word count)
For Linux
distributions, you may find a different TeX IDE to suit your tastes better; however for Windows
TexMaker was the only IDE that I was able to set-up relatively quickly, the others I tried required a lot to configure.
Focus on writing up the content of your report first. Don't worry too much about how it looks, it's much easier to deal with layout when you have more content.
I kept Images
and Figures
in a seperate folder and then when I wanted to insert them I would do:
\begin{figure}[h!]
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.6]{system_architecture}
\caption{System Architecture}
\label{fig:system_architecture}
\end{figure}
The system_architecture
would look for system_architecture.png
first and it would find the image inside the Figures
folder. However if you have images with the same name in both folders, it may cause some problems.
TeX requires the code to be compiled multiple times to fix all cross referencing issues and other things, this is partly due to the way the TeX engine was structured and built.
My compile script, of which I simply used in the Quick Build
option in TeXMaker:
pdflatex -shell-escape -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode %.tex|bibtex %|pdflatex -shell-escape -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode %.tex|pdflatex -shell-escape -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode %.tex|"C:/Program Files (x86)/Adobe/Reader 10.0/Reader/AcroRd32.exe" %.pdf
An automatic perl script exists to ensure the correct number of compilations to resolve cross references etc. through the use of latexmk. I haven't personally used it, but you might find it useful.
Please feel free to comment with any questions you may have; or fork this and make your own changes.