• Intro
  • About
  • Acknowledgment
• Usage
  • Project Structure
  • Backmatter and Frontmatter
  • Mainmatter
  • Imgs and refs.bib
  • GTUThesis.cls
  • main.tex
  • Important Note
• GTUThesis Class
  • Declare class
  • GTU Fields
  • GTU Make

This a student-made template following the thesis template guidelines of Gebze Technical University found here. I decided to create it out of frustration that a technical, research-focused university does not have a proper LaTeX template, where most publications encourage on using LaTeX to make it easier to comply, and instead opt into an old outdated MSWord template.

The template is a recreation of the original MSWord template, and not in any way a new thing. The reason behind that is that despite it being easier to create a template from the ground up, it is harder to convince the administration of moving to a new territory, not to mention that I am pro-choice, (I want people to choose LaTeX over MSWord, not for LaTeX to be imposed upon them like MSWord was imposed upon us,) and I am not ready to create an MSWord template.

Big thank you to Asst. Prof. Zafeirakis Zafeirakopoulos for encouraging me to start the project, Melike Ilteralp for helping me in the first steps, Sibel Gulmez for creating the undergrad cover page (although I have refactored it, it is still based on her work), Asst. Prof. Alp Arslan Bayrakci for giving the use of the template a green light for the undergraduate students (Autumn 2021) and giving me some feedback ideas on how to improve it, which alongside the feedback of numerous students who used it that semester led to the improved V.2 where I have moved from a package with a lot of functions to a class with most things defined there, which was inspired by the IEEEtran class.

In order to use the project more efficiently I thought an explanation of the structure of the project would be a good place to start to further the understanding of the different elements of the project.

.
├── Body			# A directory to host the .tex files of the thesis
│	├── Backmatter		# A directory with predefined .tex files containing the chapters succeeding the main thesis
│	├── Frontmatter		# A directory with predefined .tex files containing the chapters preceding the main thesis
│	└── Mainmatter		# A directory holding the .tex files of the main body of the thesis
├── Imgs			# A directory with the images to be used in the thesis
├── GTUThesis.cls		# The class file, containing the custom function and style of the thesis !DO NOT MODIFY UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOURE DOING!
├── main.tex			# The main .tex file where the thesis is declared and the rest is included
└── refs.bib			# The BibTeX reference file 

As mentioned in the structure, these directories (./Body/Backmatter and ./Body/Frontmatter) contain .tex files with the chapters preceding and succeeding the main body of the thesis, like abstract, list of acronyms, and appendices. The comments in the files themselves indicate where and what to write. Please don't edit the areas not meant to be edited.

The ./Body/Mainmatter directory is to house the .tex files of the main body of the thesis to be later included in the ./main.tex (see main.tex). They can be named anything and organised within the directory in any way deemed fit. The example has two files (C1.tex and C2.tex) demonstrating a way of using the files, but it can be used in any other way, name or convention deemed appropriate by the user.

As mentioned in the structure, ./Imgs is a directory to house the images to be used in the figures of the thesis. The files in the directory could be further organised into subdirectories, but the file ./Imgs/gtu_logo.jpg to stay in its place.

As for refs.bib, this is a BibTeX file to be filled in with the references to be used for the thesis. (copied from the publisher or scholar.google.com)

This is the file containing the custom functions and style of the GTU thesis. See GTUThesis Class for the documentation. DO NOT modify this file unless you know what you're doing and sure about the changes you want to do.

This is the main .tex file where the user firstly declares the document class as GTUThesis and then fills in the GTU-fields, followed by the used packages, and then starts the document environment, where they are expected to call the GTUMakeFront and GTUMakeBack functions respectively right after the start and before the end of the document environment. See GTUThesis Class for the documentation.

Between the GTUMakeFront and GTUMakeBack functions the user can include the files of the Main matter (recommended, see Mainmatter) using the include function as follows:

\include{./Body/Mainmatter/FILE.tex}

or write their thesis in the way they see fitting.

DO NOT delete, rename, or move the following files or directories because their paths are hard-coded:

• ./Body
• ./Body/Backmatter
• ./Body/Backmatter/Appendices.tex
• ./Body/Backmatter/CV.tex
• ./Body/Frontmatter
• ./Body/Frontmatter/Abstract.tex
• ./Body/Frontmatter/Acknowledgement.tex
• ./Body/Frontmatter/ListOfAcro.tex
• ./Body/Frontmatter/Ozet.tex
• ./Imgs
• ./Imgs/gtu_logo.jpg
• ./GTUThesis.cls
• ./refs.bib

GTUThesis.cls is the star of the show here, where the style of the thesis of GTU is defined. The user is expected to use some functions, and the demo main.tex shows how it is used. But for the sake of completion, here is the documentation for the functions which the user is expected to call in their main.

\documentclass[lang,degree]{GTUThesis}

The lang and degree options are set to set the language of the thesis (including titles and predefined text), and the degree which mainly changes some slight things in the Frontmatter. lang can take either en or tr with the former being the default, and degree takes either undergrad or graduate with the latter being the default.

These are the fields required to be filled in at the beginning of the documents, they all take one argument in the following matter

\GTUField{argument}

and they are the following.

These are two functions which produce the front-matter and the back-matter of the thesis.

\GTUMakeFront

The function above produces the front-matter including the cover, the lists of content, figures, tables, and acronyms etc. in the correct order and in the correct format for the declared class's arguments (see Declare class for more).

\GTUMakeBack{arg}

The function above produces the back-matter including the bibliography, and the optional CV and appendices. arg is a string that takes in the optional sections which the user wants to add comma separated (cv for the CV and ap for the appendices). If the user still doesn't want any optional sections, they still have to add the empty {} since the function waits for an argument which can be an empty string. So, the valid uses of the function are

\GTUMakeBack{}			% for only bibliography
\GTUMakeBack{cv}		% for bibliography and CV
\GTUMakeBack{ap}		% for bibliography and appendices
\GTUMakeBack{cv,ap}		% for bibliography, CV, and appendices