hepthesis - a LaTeX document class for academic theses
hepthesis is a LaTeX document class for typesetting academic theses. In particular, to echo Donald Knuth, it is intended to assist with theses which contain a lot of mathematics, and to this end introduces a variety of convenient devices which non-mathematical users will never notice. hepthesis grew out of my need to typeset my own PhD (in high-energy physics, hence the “hep”) and my lamentable tendencies towards over-engineering and procrastination. As is the way with such things, it’s one of the more useful things to come from my PhD (other than the excellent start along what promises to be a lifelong campaign of learning and research).
Download
hepthesis is available through the CTAN (Comprehensive TeX Archive Network) system, specifically it’s available here. The latest version is 1.4.2, which was eventually released on 23th May 2008.
Development
Without a thesis of my own to write, development and new features will be almost entirely user-driven - to this end I’ve changed the version control system used to manage the development to Bazaar. If you’re not in the know, Bazaar (or Bazaar-NG, as it’s sometimes referred to by pedants) is a distributed version control system. This makes it easier than before for users of hepthesis to make a “branch” of my repository and adapt hepthesis as they see fit, without needing commit access to my repository. Then, if they think they’ve done something useful, they can send me a copy of their branch (by email or by uploading to a website somewhere) and I’ll merge it in if I like it. I think this is a promising model, given that I’m unlikely to be the driving force behind future changes: the more work that can be done by others, the better :-)
You can check out the repository from here by either using something like
bzr branch http://bzr.insectnation.org/hepthesis/trunk hepthesis
or
bzr checkout http://bzr.insectnation.org/hepthesis/trunk hepthesis
See the bzr documentation for information on the variety of different ways that bzr can use remote repositories.
