Dissertation Typesetting Considerations

I just handed in my dissertation

The thesis is available here, and you can also check out the full source code. For more information, also check here.

, which is more or less the culmination of the last three and a half years of my (mathematical) life. While the maths itself is perhaps relatively inaccessible to the general public, some of the typesetting considerations that went into the document might not be.

For reference, here are a few pages of how the end product looks like:

While this post really is about typography, I will say that making LaTeX acceptably fast for these kinds of medium-sized documents really helped preserve an epsilon of sanity. Fiddling around with preamble precompiling and externalisation is—while painful—definitely worth it.

The document class§

I flip-flopped between the only two relevant contenders: memoir and koma-script (which features the scrbook class). In the end, memoir won solely because I found the manual more pleasant to read, and thus had an easier time customising things.

It is also much more extensive. Both manuals clock in at around 600 pages, but the memoir manual is only about one class! There are also a bunch of concrete and extensive examples, which are very good to learn from.

I also had the feeling that memoir laid a more heavy emphasis on typographical considerations, but this might be because I didn’t read the koma-script manual as closely. This choice did probably not matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, but I’m quite happy with memoir and would recommend it for any kind of book-length project.

The page layout§

The default a4paper page layout that memoir has is fine, though \isopage—inspired by page dimensions suggested by Robert Bringhurst—yields a nicer looking printout in my opinion. This is especially true with a slightly larger font size, which is more or less mandatory if you have to print something in as big of a format as A4.

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The different default page layouts for A4 paper, taken from the memoir manual.

Being a little bit wider, it is also good for long-ish formulas and large-ish diagrams, of which my thesis has more than enough. Together with my chosen fonts below, the final page layout results in a maximum of about 72 characters per line. This is on the higher side of what I would prefer, but either increasing the font size or decreasing the margins would impede too much on the actual content, so I kept it this way.

Sidenotes—much more on that later—are constrained to a maximum of around 21 characters via

This is quite narrow, much narrower than the sidenotes on this website for example, but still workable. It certainly helps me to not go overboard with them, which is not advisable anyways given the context of a dissertation in mathematics; their mere existence probably stretches my novelty budget quite a bit.

Chapter headings§

For chapter headings memoir features a bringhurst chapter style, which however doesn’t include the chapter number besides it:

The famous book [Brin92] puts a rather large number in the margin, which is also what I ended up going with (see the first double page in this post). Thankfully, this is not difficult to fix—so much so that someone on TeX.Stack​exachange has already done it. The exact bringhurst.sty file I used is here; to use it just replace the call to \chapterstyle with a call to \usepackage:

The margin§

As you can probably tell from this website,

Unless you’re on mobile, I suppose.

I love sidenotes. Sadly, this is about where one hits their first bump, in that memoir and the sidenotes package are incompatible. For example, both define a \sidecaption command, and both import changepage, although with different options. However, LaTeX’s error messages are actually comprehensible in these cases, so patching the sidenotes package is straightforward.

The \sidenote command now works as expected; I wrote a small wrapper that additionally sets sidenotes ragged left or right, depending on the parity of the page.

Interestingly, I don’t actually use the \sidecaption implementation of either memoir or sidenotes, but chose to roll my own:

This is probably less code than what it would take to customise memoir’s \sidecaption to do what I want, and I get more control over the actual typesetting on top of it. The price one pays is that the usage of \scaption is a tad unintuitive, in that the \label of the figure has to go inside of the caption:

However, I think the end result looks quite nice:

Another thing I did was pushing equation numbers into the margin. Instead of

my thesis instead displays such an equation as

which in particular means that equation numbers are sometimes on the left of the page, depending on where the margin is. This is quite nice for larger diagrams or longer formulas, which nevertheless still have to have an equation number. Figures now neither need to intrude upon the margin, nor be scaled quite so aggressively.

The code for this is a bit more involved, but luckily TeX.Stackexchange has us covered yet again!

Picking fonts§

For the default calligraphic font, I settled on boondoxupr from the excellently documented mathalfa package. It changes the default Computer Modern alphabet

to

I also went ahead and chose a Fraktur font that is slightly less bold—esstix.

However, much more important than that is a good text font. For me, there are two top contenders here, which is Libertinus—

provided by the libertinus package—

on the one hand

and Palatino—or a clone of it, in the form of newpx—on the other:

Libertinus has one critical flaw, which is that the italic f extends way too far to the right. This clashes quite significantly with boondoxupr

and the issue only gets exacerbated once microtype comes into play and squashes those spaces even more. Palatino, while not perfect, fairs much better here:

As I didn’t want to manually check every occurrence of f at the end of a word and potentially add a thin space after it, the choice was forced upon me. There are lots of knobs to turn with the newpxtext and newpxmath packages, the full code looks like this:

Some options should be self-explanitory

—like tighter or the amsthm compatibility—

while other might require some further explanation.

• osf and scosf make sure to enable oldstyle figures everywhere-is, even within small caps, and largesc slightly increases the size of small caps, to more accurately model the size used by Linotype’s version of Palatino (the default value here is really more petite caps than small caps).
• theoremfont changes the default font used for the plain theorem style of amsthm, which I use for theorems, corollaries, and the like. It keeps the text itself in italics, but uses upright figures, parentheses, and punctuation symbols. For example, with this option, you get theorem statements like this instead of (notice the parentheses surrounding the numbering or the colon)
• p uses proportional figures (numbers) instead of tabular ones.

The newpx manual doesn’t read quite as nicely as that of mathalfa or memoir, but it’s still worth a read to get a feeling for all of the different options that exist.

In terms of microtype I’m actually quite happy with the default settings. I merely added a little bit more tracking to small caps and protrusion to sub and superscripts:

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One important change has to be made to biblatex when using a font’s oldstyle figures: the references in the main text should nevertheless use lining figures. That is, instead of

we rather want

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Also pictured: rubrication and starting sections with a few bits of small caps, which I think I picked up from Edward Tufte.

Luckily, it’s pretty easy to change the field format:

Miscellaneous thoughts§

Small macros like the following (inspired by this answer) were rather large quality of life improvements:

This creates an environment with an immediate reference to an already existing theorem, proposition, and so on, which you might want to use in an introduction—much more sightly than something like Theorem (Theorem x.y). One can use it just like a regular theoremstyle:

This will then be typeset like so, with a link to the actual result:

This taught me a bit more about how amsmath environments work under the hood. Plus, using cleveref saves one from having to define many different commands like reptheorem, repcorollary, and so on

—no going around obsessively checking whether a theorem invariably became a proposition a while ago.

A general advice I have—and also got from an older PhD student—is to start early.

Thanks, Florian!

Even just streamlining and unifying notation takes more time than ones thinks, especially if one also cares at least an epsilon about typography. What thankfully cuts down on the time needed is that LaTeX has been around for a long time, and most package manuals (that I’ve read) are quite high quality, so chances are that someone else will probably have solved your super specific problem already. Still, start early.

Lastly, I will just leave the following very important bibLaTeX configuration here.

References§