UMN Thesis Style

The University of Minnesota, like most schools, has some thesis formatting rules. They also provide a LaTeX style sheet, but the word around the computer science department is that is old, fragile, and doesn’t play well with modern LaTeX installations or many packages.

So I didn’t use it. Instead, I used the memoir document class to format my dissertation. It’s a very configurable document class, so it wasn’t too hard to get it configured to produce what Minnesota wanted. You can get the template from GitHub; it is a simplified version but has all the essentials. It also uses the TeX Gyre fonts and xelatex to embed OpenType fonts instead of the old PostScript ones (the OpenType ones look better on-screen, IMO).

I also made use of quite a few other packages, including:

• AMS math, theorem, and symbol packages
• fancyvrb
• booktabs
• sparklines
• multirow
• rotating
• algpseudocode (from algorithmicx)
• cleveref
• biblatex
• tikz

You can see the final result over here.