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How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 5): Customising Your Title Page and Abstract

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Author: Josh Cassidy (August 2013)

This five-part series of articles uses a combination of video and textual descriptions to teach the basics of writing a thesis using LaTeX. These tutorials were first published on the original ShareLateX blog site during August 2013; consequently, today's editor interface (Overleaf) has changed considerably due to the development of ShareLaTeX and the subsequent merger of ShareLaTeX and Overleaf. However, much of the content is still relevant and teaches you some basic LaTeX—skills and expertise that will apply across all platforms.

In the previous post we looked at adding a bibliography to our thesis using the biblatex package . In this, the final post of the series, we're going to look at customising some of the opening pages. In the first video we made a rather makeshift title page using the \maketitle command and by using an \includegraphics command in the \title command. Although this works, it doesn't give us as much flexibility as we may want.

The Title Page

A much better way to do this is to use the titlepage environment. We'll do this in a separate .tex file and then input it. The first thing we'll do is enclose everything in the title page within the center environment so it's all aligned to the centre. Next we need to instruct L a T e X to leave a gap between the top of the page and the first line of text. To do this we use the \vspace command followed by a length. We also need to add an asterisk into the command to make sure L a T e X doesn't decide to ignore the command. Next we'll add the thesis title in bold font using the \textbf command. To leave a gap between this and the next line of text we use the \vspace command again, this time without the asterisk. Next we'll add in a subtitle followed by some more vertical space and then the author name in bold font. This concludes what we want at the top of the title page—the rest of the content we'll add at the bottom of the title page.

To separate these two sections out we'll use the \vfill command which will automatically add in the amount of vertical space needed for the content to fill the page. Next we'll add in a line of text to specify what degree the thesis is being submitted for. The double backslash is used to create a new line. We'll then add more space before adding in the university logo specifying it's width as a fraction of the text width. Finally we'll add in some information about the university and the date.

Now in the main .tex file we can replace the \maketitle command with an input command linked to our new title page. If we now compile the code we can see all the items have been correctly processed:

However, the text is quite small so we'll go back and change the font sizes. To do this we'll use one of the simple font-sizing commands. There are ten of these to choose from, ranging from smallest to largest they are:

Let's make the title as big as it can be (using these simple commands) by choosing \Huge . We'll then make the subtitle two steps smaller using \large . When we use one of these commands they affect all the text in it's scope. Therefore in it's current state all the remaining text on the page will appear in the size of the subtitle. We'll keep it like this for the author name and degree title but we'll drop down one size for the university details and the date:

The abstract

We can also customise other pages, such as the abstract. Instead of using an unnumbered chapter, we'll create a new .tex file, customise the layout and then input it. At the top of this file we need to change the page style to plain in order to stop the headers being added in. Now in a similar way to the title page we'll add in some custom titles and then the abstract text.

This is what it will look like added in:

This concludes our series on writing a basic thesis. If you want to play around with the thesis we've created in this series you can open the project in Overleaf .

All articles in this series

• Part 1: Basic Structure ;
• Part 2: Page Layout ;
• Part 3: Figures, Subfigures and Tables ;
• Part 4: Bibliographies with BibLaTeX ;
• Part 5: Customising Your Title Page and Abstract .
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Formatting Information — An introduction to typesetting with LATEX

Chapter 2: Basic structures

Section 2.4: abstracts and summaries.

In reports and articles it is usual for the author to provide an Summary or Abstract, which describes the content and explains its importance. Abstracts in articles are usually only a couple of paragraphs long. Summaries in reports or theses can run to several pages, depending on the length and complexity of the document or the readership it’s aimed at.

In both cases (reports and articles) the Abstract or Summary is OPTIONAL (that is, L A T E X doesn’t force you to have one), but it’s rare to omit it because readers want and expect it, and it’s used by web indexing engines to let people find your work. In practice, of course, you go back and type the Abstract or Summary after having written the rest of the document, but for the sake of the example we’ll jump the gun and type it now.

You add the abstract environment after the \maketitle command, and type your Abstract or Summary in it, leaving a blank line between paragraphs if there’s more than one (see § 2.7 with reference to --> below for this convention).

In business and technical documents, the Abstract is often called a Management Summary, or Executive Summary, or Business Preview, or some similar phrase. L A T E X lets you change the name associated with the abstract environment to any other suitable text. The heading associated with the abstract environment is called the \abstractname , and you can use the \renewcommand command in your Preamble to give it a new value:

This does not change the name of the environment, only its heading: you still use \begin{abstract} and \end{abstract} .

Exercise 2.4 — Using an Abstract or Summary

Add the \renewcommand as shown above to your Preamble (call it something other than Summary if you prefer).

(The Preamble is at the start of your document, in between the \documentclass line and the \begin{document} : see the sidebar ‘The Preamble’ with reference to --> above).)

Add an abstract environment after the \maketitle and type in a paragraph or two of text.

Typeset the document.

Notice how the name of the command you are renewing (in this example, the \abstractname ) goes in the first set of curly braces, and the new value you want it to have goes in the second set of curly braces (this is an example of a command with two arguments).

A few publishers’ journal style packages ask for the Abstract to be typed before the \maketitle because they do special formatting with it along with the title block. 

Copyright © 1996–2023 Peter Flynn and Silmaril Consultants.

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Article Abstracts

< From LaTeX to ConTeXt | Document Titles >

Much as with Document Titles , the standard LaTeX article and report classes define an abstract environment to typeset an abstract in a way that distinguishes it from the rest of the text. In a single-column article, it is set somewhat narrower than the main text, with the word "Abstract" centered above it.

ConTeXt: A simple solution

The simplest way of producing an abstract in a ConTeXt document is to specify the formatting directly. The code from LaTeX's classes.dtx is nearly trivial, and is quite easy to replicate in ConTeXt idioms.

In the two-column document classes, LaTeX's abstract environment does nothing beyond putting a \section*{Abstract} in front of the abstract's text. This can be easily replicated in ConTeXt with \subject{Abstract} . (See Unnumbered Sections .)

ConTeXt: A more reusable solution

As with Document Titles , to replicate the spirit of the LaTeX environment, we might want to separate the document formatting commands from the actual text of the abstract. The low-level Context command \definestartstop defines a pair of \start - \stop commands, so we can define an abstract environment using the following commands:

This code can be placed in the document header, or can be placed in a module file to be loaded in a number of documents. It could also be enhanced by \if statements to distinguish between the one-column and two-column cases, as LaTeX does. In any case, once these commands are defined, they can be used in the obvious manner.

This, of course, produces exactly the same result as the previous illustration.

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1-column abstract in 2-column document

One often requires that the abstract of a paper should appear across the entire page, even in a two-column paper. The required trick is:

Unfortunately, with the above \thanks won’t work in the \author list. If you need such specially-numbered footnotes, you can make them like this:

As an alternative, among other facilities the abstract package provides a \saythanks command and a onecolabstract environment which remove the need to fiddle with the \thanks and footnoting. They can be used like this:

The memoir class offers all the facilities of abstract .

FAQ ID: Q-onecolabs Tags:  structure

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Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction

Title: live: latex interactive visual editing.

Abstract: LaTex coding is one of the main methods of writing an academic paper. When writing a paper, abundant proper visual or graphic components will represent more information volume than the textual data. However, most of the implementation of LaTex graphic items are designed as static items that have some weaknesses in representing more informative figures or tables with an interactive reading experience. To address this problem, we propose LIVE, a novel design methods idea to design interactive LaTex graphic items. To make a lucid representation of the main idea of LIVE, we designed several novels representing implementations that are interactive and enough explanation for the basic level principles. Using LIVE can design more graphic items, which we call the Gitems, and easily and automatically get the relationship of the mutual application of a specific range of papers, which will add more vitality and performance factors into writing of traditional papers especially the review papers. For vividly representing the functions of LIVE, we use the papers from NeRF as the example reference papers. The code of the implementation project is open source.

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