James Dean Palmer

I am working on my dissertation and UTD does not provide an official LaTeX style file for building this all important document. Instead they provide a template in.. you guessed it – MS Word. How or why people write huge documents in Word when LaTeX exists, I’ll never understand. Obviously a good many CS Ph.D. students don’t use Word. Asking around I found a LaTeX style that’s available on the web that many people have used for writing UTD dissertations. This file, which I have decided politely not to link to is evil.

It was originally lifted from one university, adapted for a second university and then finally adapted for UTD’s dissertation guidelines. Which is fine; I’m all for software reuse right? The result in this case was Frankenstein’s monster. I can see in the code how it was at one time an okay style and then several people that don’t know a lot about LaTeX kludged it here and there to do different things. Until finally, you actually have to edit the style file itself to set the title, author name and most other attributes. After reviewing it a bit I found it didn’t even match UTD’s dissertation specifications all that well. The spacing and formatting, for example, is off in several areas. I suppose I am going to have fun building my own LaTeX style..