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 here. You could also check out the development trunk version from my Mercurial/hg repository -- this will include any recent patches, since in recent times I've only made one minor patch release per year (approximately): see the next section for more details on that.

Development

Without a thesis of my own to write, development and new features will be almost entirely user-driven -- to this end I'm using the Mercurial distributed version control system. This makes it easier than with e.g. SVN for users of hepthesis to make a "clone" of my repository and adapt hepthesis as they see fit, without needing commit access to my repository. Then, you think you've done something useful, you can send me a copy of your 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 using something like

hg clone http://bzr.insectnation.org/hepthesis hepthesis

See the hg documentation, and/or hginit for information on the variety of different ways that hg can be used.