How to add extra chapters after Bibliography and Appendices?

[danilprov]

Hello everyone,

I am currently working on my PhD thesis at a university in the Netherlands, where it is common to include "Curriculum Vitae" and "Dissertations" (a list of dissertations from the same graduate school) as separate chapters at the very end.

Here is what I am trying to achieve:

However, when I add these chapters via \ntaddfile{chapter}{...}, they appear before "Bibliography" and "Appendices":

Is there a way to override this behavior and ensure these two chapters appear at the end of the document?

Thank you in advance!

Danil

[joaomlourenco]

Hi @danilprov

A couple comments/notes:

• Where are you studying? Which University will provide your degree? How did you deal with the formatting requirements, in particular (but not exclusively) the cover?
• Concerning your request, do the following:

1. Create a file with a

\chapter*{Curriculum Vitae}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Curriculum Vitae}

and add your contents.

2. Load the file with

\ntaddfile{appendix}{cv_file_name}

3. Do the same for the Dissertations list.

Let me know if this matches your expectations!

[danilprov]

Hi @joaomlourenco,

Thank you for your prompt response. This is precisely what I needed; thanks!

Regarding your questions, I am graduating from Eindhoven University. There are not many formatting requirements except two pages - one cover page from the uni and one copyright page from a graduation school. The way I addressed it is by merging the two required pages into a single file and including them as a user-defined cover page Chapters/cover-front.tex (ideally, I would like to have them as separate files, but I didn't find a simple way of implementing that). Then I uncommented

\ntaddfile{cover}[1]{cover-front}

in Config/4_files.tex file.

[joaomlourenco]

Hi @danilprov,

That was the (easy) way to go… congrats for finding it out! :)

Would you guys at Eindhoven University be interested in having a LaTeX template?

If you think so, may I ask you to share with me your cover-front.tex file? And also the contents of the Config folder? Either here or by email? And images/logos used? I can try include your stuff in the template in a more canonical way and then add Eindhoven University to the list of "supported" schools!

[danilprov]

Hi @joaomlourenco,

Sure! It would be great to have TU/e included in the list of supported schools and establish a more professional implementation (rather than relying on my improvised workarounds).

There are a few minor changes I made, and I am listing them below:

• I modified \ntprintcoverpair in novathesis.cls so that it prints the default cover (1-1) first, followed by the user-defined cover:

  \newcommand{\ntprintcoverpair}[1]{%
    % #1 = major cover ID
    \iffileadded[1]{cover}{% Deal with user-defined cover page
      \iffileadded[#1]{cover}{%
        %dp: add cover 1-1 in front of the user-defined cover page
        \ntprintcoversingle{1-1}
        \optionlistdo{/@nt/file/cover/#1}{%
          \bgroup\thispagestyle{empty}%
          \@ntloadfile@i[\ClassError{novathesis}{Invalid cover file: “##1”}{}]{##1}%
          \egroup\clearpage%
        }%
        %dp: \ntprintcoversingle{2-1}%
      }{}%
    }{% Pre-defined cover page
      \IfStrEqCase{#1}{%
        {1}{\ntprintcoversingle{#1-1}\ntprintcoversingle{#1-2}}%
        {2}{\iftoggle{/novathesis/print/secondcover}
                     {\ntprintcoversingle{#1-1}\ntprintcoversingle{#1-2}}{}}%
        {N}{\ntprintcoversingle{#1-1}\ntprintcoversingle{#1-2}}%
      }[\ClassWarning{Invalid cover number: #1}{}]%
    }%
  }

• I made a (very marginal) adjustment to the default cover (1-1) to remove the month and year from the bottom of the page:

  % Date
  \ntaddtocover[vspace=1]{1-1}{%
    \fontsize{12}{12}\selectfont
    % dp: remove month and year from the title page and keep a blank line instead
    %  \thentdocdate(submission,month,text), \thentdocdate(submission,year)%
  }

  This is implemented in NOVAthesisFiles/Schools/other/tue/other-tue-defaults.ldf

I’m attaching all the requested files to this thread, along with a compiled example of the title page. Please let me know if this is sufficient or if you need anything else.
tue_support_novathesis.zip
tue_front_cover_example.pdf

Thank you again for your assistance and your great project!

Best,
Danil

[joaomlourenco]

@danilprov thanks for the additional info and materials.
You did an impressive work with customization for TUE. It looks quite solid. :)
I have a few more requests form you, if you are still willing to help me with this…

1. You have a file cover.tex for drawing the cover. But it does not draw the very first page (unnumbered) from your PDF. How was it generated? Is it necessary even for the final version of the thesis?
2. What is supposed to go into the "Cover Image", "Cover design" and "Printed by" fields? Attribution names?
3. Can you help translating the file NOVAthesisFiles/Strings/strings-en.ldf into NOVAthesisFiles/Strings/strings-en.ldf? For example, in \adviserstring(a,1,m,en) the 1 means singular (2 means plural), m means male, f means female. For english the latter makes no difference, but latin languages have different forms for male and female.

[danilprov]

Thank you for your kind words, and my apologies for the delay in getting back to you. While I am still working on the translation, I wanted to address two of your other questions:

1. The first page is generated by the file NOVAthesisFiles/Schools/other/tue/other-tue-defaults.ldf. Essentially, I modified your original first page to omit the month and year, while maintaining the blank line. Here is the main change I made:

% lines 132-137 in NOVAthesisFiles/Schools/other/tue/other-tue-defaults.ldf
% dp: remove month and year from title page but keep the blank line
% Date
\ntaddtocover[vspace=1]{1-1}{%
  \fontsize{12}{12}\selectfont
  %
}

2. In the Netherlands, PhD students are responsible for designing their own cover. This can be done by the students themselves, their friends, or professional designers. The fields "Cover Image" and "Cover design" acknowledge the designers of the cover image (a key visual element) and the overall cover design, respectively.

   The "Printed by" field is for the company that prints the thesis. Students are free to collaborate with any printing company of their choice.

3. I am still waiting for the translation from my colleagues and will get back to you as soon as I receive it. Thank you for your patience.

Additionally, I wanted to ask if there is a simple way to change the page size from A4 to a custom size defined by width and height parameters.

Thank you in advance!

[joaomlourenco]

You can change the page size globally in the file Config/0_memoir.tex. Any page size valid for memoir is valid here.
The options in this file are not much tested, so let me know is there is some bug there.

[danilprov]

Hi @joaomlourenco,

Sorry for the delay, and thank you for your patience.

I’ve now obtained the translation of the keywords, and I would like to acknowledge my colleague Mickey Beurskens for providing it. His contribution was a great help.
strings-nl.ldf.zip

Regarding the page size, everything works fine. The only change I needed to make was to comment out the following line \AtEndPreamble{\ntsetlayout}% in novathesis.cls and define custom margins in template.tex directly.

Finally, I wanted to share that the thesis looked fantastic in print. It actually sparked a lot of interest among my colleagues, and several are now considering using the template for their own theses.

Please let me know if you need any further information from my side. Thank you again for your excellent project and for all your support.

Best,
Danil

[joaomlourenco]

HI @danilprov
Thank you (and Mickey Beurskens) very much for your contribution.
I've been quite busy lately and had very limited time to work on the template. Will try to come back to this asap.
May I ask you to proved me with a public link to your thesis? (Or just send it to me by email!) I would like to double check the structure and contents of the frontmatter in your final document.

[danilprov]

Hi @joaomlourenco,

Thank you for your response.
You can access a copy of my thesis by following this link. I have also sent you a latex source file of my thesis via email.