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Important information and helpful hints |
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Templates
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First, download a copy of my thesis
template, thesis style
file, and thesis bibliography
style file. Note that I like to split my thesis into
multiple tex files and use the "\input" command, you certainly
don't have to. Put these files in the same directory.
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Table of Contents
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Table of contents (TOC), List of Figures (LOF), and References
are the three places you are most likely to get into trouble
with the format checking guy. Remember to always use the
following rule when you write you chapter/section headings:
- Capitalize every letter (JOINT SOURCE-CHANNEL MATCHING) for
\chapter headings.
- Capitalize first letter of every word (Joint
Source-Channel Matching) for \section headings.
- Capitalize first letter of the first word (Joint
source-channel matching) for \subsection headings.
If you have appendices and references, their position in TOC
need to be adjusted to satisfy format-checking. Download and
modify fixtoc.pl for your use. It
is a simple Perl script which does the job for you. Since TOC
file is modified every time you run latex, you have to manually
overwrite the old TOC or use the latex.sh script to do it for you. Run
"latex.sh thesis" (assuming your main file is named thesis.tex
of course) to get the postscript output.
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Figures
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Make sure you use the same convention for all the captions of
the figures.
- Capitalize only the first letter of the first word.
- Always append a dot at the end of the caption (\caption{
Joint Source-Channel Matching Diagram.})
- Make sure the figure appears either on the same page or
the right next page where it is first refered to. When it
can't be done in LaTeX, move your reference so long as it
doesn't hurt the presentation of the thesis.
- Make sure that you don't have a page with only one figure
and too much blank space. If this happens, resize the figure.
- Make sure you use 15 point fonts when plotting results in
Matlab.
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References
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References are a pain in the neck since you never know which
format is correct. There are a few rules that you can follow:
- Do NOT use the month field for @INPROCEEDINGS
entry, since they mess up things. The month field is
not required. Also, remove the year field and add it
at the end of the name of the conference field, so instead of
having a year field, now you have the booktitle
field looking like "Proceedings of ICIP 1995". This is
sufficient.
- If a @BOOK entry is present, remove the address
field and insert it into the publisher field, so you
have a publisher field looking like "Reading, MA:
Addision-Wesley".
- For names like "Ya-Qin Zhang", you have to use
"Y.-Q.~Zhang" in your author field.
- The best place to find all information for your references
is
IEEE Xplore website.
Format-checking requires a dot instead of a comma after the book
title, you can either modify the bibliography style file (which
I don't know how) or use the fixbbl.pl script to fix it for you.
You MUST modify it before you can use it. After you run bibtex,
copy thesis.bbl to temp.bbl, then run "fixbbl temp.bbl
thesis.bbl" to fix it, then run latex.sh again.
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Abbreviations
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The point here is that the potential reader of our thesis might
not actually know what FFT means, so we need to explain every
single abbreviation. You have to italicize the expanded full
term.
- For field-specific terms, such as DCT, use "discrete
cosince transform (DCT)".
- For well-known terms, such as MPEG, use "Motion Picture
Expert Group (MPEG)". All network protocols have to be
capitalized in first letter of every word.
Remember, no matter how obvious the abbreviation seems to you,
you have to explain it when it's first used. If a term is used
infrequently, you should expand and explain it in each chapter,
you don't have to do it if it's constantly being used.
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Now, you have finished writing the thesis, let's get to
format checking.
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