Notes on Filing a Dissertation at UCLA using LaTeX
I
wrote my dissertation with a computer running Red Hat Linux 8.0
using GNU Emacs, latex, and pdflatex.
The final version was compiled using pdflatex and
printed using Adobe Acrobat (for Linux).
Some quick things to keep in mind:
- You may search the web and find a style file called
ucthesis.cls or something like that claiming to be the
UC Thesis style file. This file is INCORRECT for UCLA.
The ucthesis.cls file that seems to be floating around
the net is for UC Berkeley, not UCLA. The UC Berkeley
and UCLA dissertation styles are totally different. You need to
look for a file called uclathes.cls and related files
uclath12.clo, uclathti.clo, and
uclathma.clo. Also, look at the sample pages in the
UCLA policies for filing your dissertation.
- Assuming you find the UCLA Thesis LaTeX class files,
don't trust them. When you compile your dissertation,
make sure you measure the margins and stuff with a ruler.
- If you use pdflatex to compile a PDF version of
your dissertation, be aware the different versions of Adobe
Acrobat appear to print things differently, with different
spacings and everything. That is, if you print your
dissertation using Acrobat for Linux, some of the spacings will
be different from what you might get if you print using Acrobat
for Windows. The easiest way to deal with this is always
print your dissertation using the same version of Acrobat,
on the same platform (Windows, Linux, MacOS, etc.), and if
possible, on the same computer.
- When I ran pdflatex I consistently got one error
which paused the compilation process. I justed hit the
return key and ignored the error. There didn't appear
to be any problem. To this day I still don't know what the
error was (something about the bibliography).
Changes to the uclathes.cls file
I made one
change to the uclathes.cls file, and that was the line
spacing. UCLA rules say that you can have a maximum of 3 lines of
text and 3 spaces (a total of 6 lines) per inch of vertical space
on the page. The value that I originally had set for the double
spacing was \def\@doublespacing{1.544}. But this turned
out to be not enough. I commented this original setting out and
set \def\@doublespacing{1.75}, which gave me just under
6 total lines per vertical inch.
From my limited experience using Acrobat on Windows, it
appears that Acrobat for Windows compresses the line spacing even
more than Acrobat for Linux. Therefore, you may need to increase
the setting for the double spacing. Adjust it and measure with a
ruler to get the right setting for your platform.
Changes to the uclath12.clo file
One annoying
thing I almost missed was that the distance between the bottom of
the last line of text and the top of the page number must be at
least 0.75 inches. The original setting was \footskip
0.75in. But the \footskip directive measures the
distance from the bottom of the last line of text to the
bottom of the page number. Since the page number itself is
about 0.25 inches (using the 12 point font), you need to take
this into account. Therefore, I set \footskip 1in and
adjusted the textheight to be \textheight 8in.