Usage

You will need to learn some latex before you can use the package productively. There are many textbooks on latex, and many online tutorials. There are also online books, "The not so short introduction to LaTeX 2e" by Oetiker et al. (2014) being a highly-regarded example.

Once you've installed as explained in the Installation link, you will find that you have a file named mythesis.tex and that this contains a thesis template. The easiest way to get started is to try running latex on this. Once that works, try altering something in the document, perhaps the title and author name. After a few minutes of this, you'll be ready to try adding a citation to the bibtex file. Next, try hooking up a new figure. Once you've got these things working, you will be ``cooking with gas'' as they once used to say.

Naturally, you will need to make copies of what you've downloaded, in case you mess things up. Bear in mind that the materials may change at any moment. If you run into problems with formatting, check the Bugs link.

A few notes and hints are listed below.

The margins are 0.05 inches wider than the width specified by the Faculty of Graduate Studies. This is to avoid problems that arise by slight displacements in different printers.
To get rotated captions and tables, put \usepackage{lscape} in the .tex file, and then put \begin{landscape} before content that is to go into landscape mode, and \end{landscape} to return to normal mode. (Thanks to John Foster for this hint.)
To get degree symbols with less typesetting, put \usepackage{textcomp} in your .tex file and then write e.g. 10\textdegree{} instead of 10$^\circ$. (Thanks to John Foster for this hint.)
The title of the bibliography may be changed by putting something like \renewcommand{\bibname}{References} in the beginning of the .tex file. (Thanks to John Foster for this hint.)
Long chapter or section headings can cover more than a single line in the table of contents. This is a problem because FGS requires such lines should be single spaced, not double-spaced like the rest of the TOC. Many universities have this rule, and for some setups, a solution is to use the tocloft package. However, this package does not interact well with the present style sheet (or with sheets used at other universities). However, there is a good solution for titles that span exactly two lines. This is illustrated in the chapter1.texsample file, in the lines that look like the following.
```
\chapter[\label{c:intro}\protect\vspace{-1.3ex}
Introduction: This Chapter Title is Very Long, so we Can See\\
if a fancy trick makes it single spaced]
{Introduction: This Chapter Title is Very Long, so we Can See
if a fancy trick makes it single spaced}
```
Place the hard hard break at the spot that latex normally breaks the line in the TOC. It may be necessary to alter the vertical space if your lines contain subscripts or superscripts.
The university "DalSpace" facility requires PDF/A format for archiving. Although there are supposedly ways to get latex to create this, the best scheme may be to prepare a normal PDF document and then to ask the university if they can provide software to make the conversion (e.g. Adobe Acrobat) or let you run such software on its computers. See also the university submitting your thesis website for rules on file names, etc.