A (Xe)LaTeX Thesis Template

A (Xe)LaTeX thesis template conforming to Carleton University's thesis formatting guidelines. To be compiled to either PDF or PDF/A. Tested with Texmaker for Windows.

Regular PDF

• Ensure that your main.tex includes \usepackage{CU-thesis}
• Modify the CU-thesis.sty file to your liking

Compile order: XeLaTeX → BibTeX → XeLaTeX → XeLaTeX → View PDF

PDF/A

• Ensure that your main-pdfa.tex includes \usepackage{CU-thesis-pdfa}
• Modify the CU-thesis-pdfa.sty file to your liking

As per the pdfx documentation, -shell-escape needs to be added as an option for XeLaTeX. Instead of modifying the existing XeLaTeX build command, create a new one.

1. In Texmaker, go to User → User Commands → Edit User Commands.

2. Create a new command like below

by borrowing the default options from XeLaTeX (use the wizard to auto-populate this field as it may depend on your OS) and appending

-shell-escape

to the end.

New compile order: XeLaTeX (PDFA) → BibTeX → XeLaTeX (PDFA) → XeLaTeX (PDFA) → View PDF.

Differences between main.tex and main-PDFA.tex

The PDF/A creation is done through the pdfx package. As recommended in the documentation, pdfx should be the first package loaded. In addition, pdfx loads hyperref (and other packages - see pdfx documentation for the full list), so \hypersetup should be used to configure options for hyperref. For regular PDFs, the pdfx package does not need to be loaded and hyperref can be loaded as usual (with consideration for any other packages that may also load hyperref.)

For regular PDFs, metadata can be supplied in the options of hyperref. For PDF/A, metadata is supplied through the \jobname.xmpdata file, where \jobname is the name of the .tex file. See pdfx documentation for the full list of supported metadata options.