+1. The blue titles, the unnecessary lines and the fact that he branded it with the whole Clean<bold>Thesis</bold> thing doesn't really sound clean in my book.
I'm currently looking for a thesis template as well, but the more I come across (1) the more I just want to do something like http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/.
I just finished a rant on a certain tex forum about how LaTeX adds 10x complexity (to TeX + plainTeX) for making end-user's life about 10% easier.
My two cents:
- Once you become a moderately advanced LaTeX user, you need more control over your document.
- This almost exclusively leads to a preamble that is a complete mess of spaghetti code.
- Putting that mess in a separate file doesn't solve the issue, only hides it.
- Another view is that if your preamble is a mess, your document is screaming at you to create your own documentclass (or rename the class you're using and modify it).
- But that requires you become familiar with LaTeX (and TeX) internals.
- But that is way harder than becoming familiar with TeX + PlainTeX.
Therefore, as an intermediate to advanced TeX user I'm beginning to believe that TeX + PlainTeX is a much better approach. Although you'd sacrifice advanced functionality of hundreds of LaTeX packages, but people who wrote those packages could've easily written TeX macro-collections. LaTeX is used more only because it has more momentum behind it; otherwise PlainTex is a much cleaner approach.
If you're willing to get under the hood of the whole system, I highly recommend Knuth's The TeXbook.
P.S.: Just for comparison, LaTeX *.ltx files are about ~10,000 LOCs compared to ~1200 LOCs of plain.tex (which is fully documented in Appendix B of The TeXbook).
Not a thesis template at all, but great ideas and it sheds some light on how to get decent typography.
On a side note, I think it would be great to have a good WYSIWYG TeX editor for office/basic user level of proficiency. Typesetting does matter, it profoundly impacts reading, which is particularly relevant when you're giving 300+ pages of your hard work for someone else to read. It would be very good for everyone to get decent default typesetting. Unfortunately, our alternatives are:
* Word/typical word processors, which are are horrible at typesetting;
* TeX, which is good, but it's hard for most people and has an aura of complexity (it's code, after all...);
* Publishing software, such as Adobe InDesign, which are indeed great at typesetting, but only if you know what you are doing. This is professional software, which is clearly not aimed at common users.
My two cents:
- Once you become a moderately advanced LaTeX user, you need more control over your document.
- This almost exclusively leads to a preamble that is a complete mess of spaghetti code.
- Putting that mess in a separate file doesn't solve the issue, only hides it.
- Another view is that if your preamble is a mess, your document is screaming at you to create your own documentclass (or rename the class you're using and modify it).
- But that requires you become familiar with LaTeX (and TeX) internals.
- But that is way harder than becoming familiar with TeX + PlainTeX.
Therefore, as an intermediate to advanced TeX user I'm beginning to believe that TeX + PlainTeX is a much better approach. Although you'd sacrifice advanced functionality of hundreds of LaTeX packages, but people who wrote those packages could've easily written TeX macro-collections. LaTeX is used more only because it has more momentum behind it; otherwise PlainTex is a much cleaner approach.
If you're willing to get under the hood of the whole system, I highly recommend Knuth's The TeXbook.
P.S.: Just for comparison, LaTeX *.ltx files are about ~10,000 LOCs compared to ~1200 LOCs of plain.tex (which is fully documented in Appendix B of The TeXbook).