LaTeX templates for theses and dissertations at Bowling Green State University See https://www.bgsu.edu/graduate/thesis-and-dissertations/thesis-dissertation-handbook.html for the requirements.
Nate Iverson created the first version of this template. Ying-Ju Chen, John Haman, and Maria Rizzo also made contributions. Dr. Rizzo also maintains a version of the template, see https://github.com/mariarizzo/BGthesis
The file dissertation.tex is the central file that you would run with LaTeX. There are separate files for the abstract, chapters, appendix, references, and other things. The file BGSU.cls contains pretty much all of the BGSU-specific formatting commands. Hopefully you will not need to edit it very much. If you are writing a thesis, change line 57 of BGSU.cls to \def@doctype{Thesis}. You may also want to rename dissertation.tex to be thesis.tex.
Overleaf is an online LaTeX editor, and the current version works well with Overleaf. From the Overleaf main menu, click New Project, Import from GitHub, and navigate to https://github.com/clzirbel/BGSU-LaTeX-Templates
Note that when you read the PDF produced by PDF LaTeX, you can use the hyperlinks to navigate within the documents, and use Left Alt-Left arrow to go back to where you were.
Note that when you include images from outside sources, you will need to request copyright permission to include those in your dissertation, since it will be published online. To do this, you will need to send a message to the copyright holder, get their permission, and then include those messages as an appendix in your dissertation. That will be time consuming and difficult. It may be better to always make your own images, or just refer to images in other publications without showing them.
After finishing your dissertation or thesis (congratulations!) and producing a PDF, you will need to use Adobe Acrobat to set document properties and other things before you submit to BGSU. Some specific steps:
- In Adobe Acrobat: File, Properties, Description, remove any double quotation marks from the Keywords
- In Adobe Acrobat: File, Properties, Initial View, Show, Document Title to get the title bar to show the title of the work instead of the filename
- In Adobe Acrobat: File, Properties, Advanced, Language, English
- Follow the instructions at http://www.bgsu.edu/graduate/thesis-and-dissertations/converting-your-document-to-pdf.html to embed fonts
- Follow the instructions at the link above to check accessibility; instead of Full Check it may be called Accessibility Check. Work through all of the red x's to fix them. A very important thing to note is that you do NOT want to autotag the document. BGSU will work with you regarding this, but the office has stated in the past that this is the one red x you want to avoid. If Acrobat is putting very large parentheses randomly in your PDF, that is probably because you auto-tagged, and you should just not auto-tag. You can also read this page about the Accessibility Check: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/create-verify-pdf-accessibility.html
- One step in the Accessibility Check is to set alternate text for each figure (image) and table. Do this last, after Acrobat has tagged the document. If you follow the instructions above, add alt text only in Step 9, which are steps for LaTeX users. That way, you will only have to add alt text once. Follow the instructions at the link above concerning number of characters and content of the alternate text. I don't know how to add alt text in the LaTeX source code, so I would recommend keeping a separate file with alt text for each image, which you can copy and paste in one step at the end. (I tried the accessibility package but was not able to get it to work.) If you figure out how to add alt text for each image directly in LaTeX, please let me know.
- The link above explains how to check the reading order on each page of your document. Level 1 headings need to be marked. Essentially you need to scroll through your document, drag a box around the heading at the beginning of each chapter, and click Heading 1. Also do this for the Abstract, Table of Contents, List of Figures, Chapters, Bibliography, Appendices. It should also be done for the headings of Acknowledgments, List of Tables, Preface, but these may be recognized as tables and so cannot be marked as Heading 1. You do not need to mark section headings (Section 1.1, 1.2, etc.) or subsection headings. You can see what type each element is by checking Structure types. Also look for any text that is not in a gray box or is not in order on the page.
A problem with LaTeX documents is that hyperlinks within the document are not tagged as being hyperlinks, so a visually impaired person might not know that they are hyperlinks. Hopefully we will find a good way to deal with this, but for now:
- The only method that is known to work as of 2/20/2022 is this: remove all hyperlinks using Adobe Acrobat following these steps: Print Production, Preflight, Flatten annotations and form field. It may be easiest to do this before checking for accessibility, as hyperlinks are one of the aspects of the document which are checked. This wipes the hyperlinks that LaTeX provided, making the document compliant. You can submit the "flat" version to OhioLink as the official dissertation and the version with hyperlinks as a Supplemental File for OhioLink.
Overleaf has a helpful article about tagging PDFs, see https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/An_introduction_to_tagged_PDF_files%3A_internals_and_the_challenges_of_accessibility Hopefully over time Overleaf and the LaTeX community will develop better tools for making accessible PDFs.
When you submit to OhioLink, you need to copy and paste the abstract. If you have LaTeX symbols in the abstract, OhioLink won't understand those, but you can submit HTML codes for the special symbols, and then Preview to see that it is working correctly. One way to get HTML codes is to use ChatGPT. The following prompt worked pretty well:
Please convert the following LaTeX code to HTML in such a way that superscripts and subscpripts and special characters appear correctly on the screen in a web browser, using tags <sub>, <sup>, <p>, <em>, <i>, <strong>. Use italics for mathematics enclosed in $ symbols. Do not use bold font. Do not use the <b> tag. Use special characters such as 𝔻 and ϕ and ∞ when possible instead of HTML codes like ℐ. When converting the LaTeX \frac command use parentheses around the numerator and denominator and use / to indicate division. Do not change the font-family using a <span> tag.
Save the HTML version in a file called abstract.html and make sure the file starts with <html>. Double click abstract.html to preview the HTML version and edit until it looks correct. Don't just trust ChatGPT!
It is important that equations can be read out loud with a screen reader. As of 2/20/2022, pdfLaTeX produced a version that could be read by the Adobe Reader Read Out Loud feature. To hear what it sounds like, follow these steps.
- Open Adobe Reader, then Edit, Preferences, Security (Enhanced), uncheck Enable Protected Mode at startup. Re-start Adobe Reader and open your PDF and do: View, Read Out Loud, Activate Read Out Loud, View, Read Out Loud, Read This Page Only.
The LaTeX axessibility package is designed to produce text for typeset mathematics that can be read by a screen reader, but it did not work as well as what was produced without the axessibility pacakge. For now, the recommendation is to not use the axessibility package. Hopefully the axessibility package will improve over time. In case this changes in the future, here is how to use the axessibility package. Process your document with LuaLaTeX. If you are running LaTeX on your own computer, this may require installing several packages. On Overleaf, upload the project, then click the Menu and set the compiler to LuaLaTeX. Code in dissertation.tex and BGSU.cls will detect that you are using LuaLaTeX and will load the axessibility package and other packages.
Another important note is regarding accessibility. The LaTeX project (who officially maintain LaTeX) has announced a multi-year project in order to fix accessibility (primarily focused on tagging) for LaTeX documents. It is important to note that this has caused some accessibility packages (but not axessibility) to be in a form of maintainance mode, that is one with minimal updates due to the expectation they will be obsolete in a couple years. It appears as if the eventual goal of the project will be to integrate accessibility at a fundamental level with LaTeX, although this will take some time.