LaTeX format for PhD thesis in Physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. This is based on the LaTeX "book" class. The document format used here are in accordance to the specifications mentioned on the website of Subject Board of Physics, TIFR and formats presented on Datanet2.0. The main file that is compiled is thesis.tex. NOTE: \lipsum is used to put in placeholder text. Please delete the lines to remove the placeholder text.

Directory structure

This format is stored in a public repository. All the other files are organized under the main directory under the following directory names

1. tifr-thesis/preamble: contains the title page and all the other mandatory pages before the table-of-contents (TOC)
2. tifr-thesis/chapters: Each chapter needs to be placed in a separate .tex file inside this folder.
3. tifr-thesis/figures: all the figures are to be placed here
4. tifr-thesis/appendix: all the .tex files corresponding to appendices are to be placed here

Further instructions for modifying the thesis are provided as comments in thesis.tex file.

Compilation and PDF generation

The package comes with 3 bash scripts which help in compilation and cleaning up of auxilliary files. compilepdf.sh, cleanlatex.sh, ccc.sh. To compile the document and generate PDF file, use the command

sh compilepdf.sh

To clean the auxilliary LaTeX files generated during compilation, use the command

sh cleanlatex.sh

Ensure that there are no errors when you run the sh compilepdf.sh. Once you are confident about the non-existence of errors, you can run the clean-compile-clean cycle.

sh ccc.sh

Note: This suppresses all output. Hence, presence of errors will stop the compilation without prompting for user input. It's important, therefore to use ccc.sh only in the final stages of your manuscript preparation.

Generation of ink-signature for declaration

Dependencies: potrace and ghostscript. The declaration page requires the signature of the candidate and the thesis advisor. Here's a procedure to generate a digital version of ink-signature on paper.

1. Sign on a blank piece of paper; Click picture of it on phone camera and crop appropriately so that only the signature remains. This is usually in the .jpg format.

2. The .jpg image has colors of the paper as well. Converting the image to eps is a vectorizing process, where all the extraneous details are eliminated and the image has a white background with signature in black.

convert sign.jpg -type truecolor sign.bmp
potrace sign.bmp
gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dEPSCrop -r600 -sDEVICE=pngalpha -sOutputFile=sign.png sign.eps
ps2pdf -dEPSCrop -dCompressPages=false sign.eps sign.pdf

This creates a .png image. Place the sign.png file in tifr-thesis/figures and the declaration should be able to read the file from there.