The UGA Thesis/Dissertation LaTeX Template

(Work in progress -- my apologies)

The Template

This template was, to the best of my knowledge, developed by Dr. Michael Covington. He kindly provided me with a copy, and I am making it available to students at UGA. You need two files,

Download both files and place them in the same directory.

Prerequisites

You'll need the LaTeX environment installed on your computer. The LaTeX environment is available for most platforms:

Linux, especially Debian/Ubuntu-derived flavors: Look in your repository for texlive and install it ideally via software center. Linux versions are a bit more tricky than MacOS or Windows versions due to the large number of options and optional packages. More on those below.
MacOS: Install MacTeX. Go.
Windows: Get MikTeX and install it.

MacTeX and MikTeX (AFAIK) come with an editor and a development interface. In Linux, you choose your own among perhaps a dozen. If you like the no-frills variant, you can use any text editor (gedit, kate, nedit -- heck, even emacs) and use the plain latex command-line commands. I found the "latexmk" utility very helpful -- it works much like "make".

If you prefer an integrated environment, some LaTeX IDEs are kile (KDE's Integrated LaTeX Editor), texmaker, and (... I guess I'll add to this list if I run into good recommendations).

In addition to the above you probably also want to have a citation manager. BibTeX files, exactly like .tex source files, are plain-text files and can be edited with any text editor. There are bibliography managers available, of course, such as kBibTeX, jabref, and as an interesting on-line alternative, Zotero.

How to make life simpler with LaTeX

First and foremost, consider the learning curve. You invest in LaTeX up-front, and you reap the benefits at a time when your graduation nears and the deadlines just hammer you. If you have your thesis/dissertation in decent shape at that time, LaTeX will do the work for you. Conversely, I have seen students struggle during this critical time period with the idiosyncracies of major word processors, which tend to act up in quite unpredictable ways as the document's file size grows.

Second,