[texhax] ASU Thesis/Dissertation Style File

[Dorothy Jammins]

>> LaTeX, developed by a former ASU student, 

So according to them LaTeX was developed in ASU! 

Anyway many universities are clueless when it comes to preparing a document. I'm in engineering and we were told to avoid latex because it creates many problems and it is difficult to consistently follow the formatting requirements! Of course when the requirement is to *put a 1" space between the top margin and the header by pressing enter 5 times* it goes to show that the formatting guide was prepared by clueless people for clueless people. Similarly doublespacing, left aligned text or one font size for all headers and body text seem to be leftovers from the age of typewriters.

>> Anyway, I am currently using the asthesis.sty file (with hopes I can get 
>> help from texhax to make the necessary changes to fix any formatting issues), 

If the formatting hasn't changed significantly then this is the best course of action. Otherwise I've found that it is difficult to edit old class files. In my case I found 3 that were 6 to 12 years old but with no comments and a lot of hacks it was really difficult to bring them up to date. An alternative is to use a class that allows heavy customization like memoir. Personally I picked the report class, made some environments for the frontmatter and used some packages like geometry, tocloft, fancyref to finetune formatting.

d