[texhax] ASU Thesis/Dissertation Style File

[Sam Rhoads]

Back in the dark ages my school had a policy prohibiting theses done
with dot-matrix printers.  Then someone told someone on the committee
how laser printers worked, and then laser printers were prohibited as
well since they used lots of tiny dots.

Sam Rhoads

> Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2009 12:55:40 -0700
> From: Robert Wilson <millstadtf at gmail.com>
> To: Dorothy Jammins <dorothy.jammins at yahoo.com>
> Cc: texhax at tug.org, Sharon Baker <sharon_baker at asu.edu>
> Subject: Re: [texhax] ASU Thesis/Dissertation Style File
> 
> Purely in the interest of airing grievances,
> I had a similar problem in my college senior design course. Our papers had
> to adhere to the AIAA formatting guidelines. Naturally, I looked for (and
> found) an AIAA LaTeX class on their website and used it in typesetting my
> first paper. And then my professor complained that my paper was formatted
> incorrectly. As it turns out, the style file on the AIAA website was out of
> date, but if you can't trust the Official style file on the Official
> website, what can you trust?
> 
> More relevantly, I was able to edit the LaTeX and BibTeX files to get the
> formatting I wanted, but it wasn't easy (and required a lot of help from
> this mailing list!), so if you do happen to get it working, please donate it
> to the school or post it somewhere so that society may benefit.
> 
> Good Luck!
> -Bob Wilson
> 
> 
> On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Dorothy Jammins
> <dorothy.jammins at yahoo.com>wrote:
> 
> >
> > >> 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
> >