Title Page for PhD Thesis at Bocconi University

This repo contains simple LaTeX code to create a title page that suits the requirements of the PhD School at Bocconi University.

The University offers a Microsoft Word template (download), together with other typographic instructions at their dedicated webpage. However, I work with LaTeX and I need to code up the title page from scratch. So I put this here in the hope that it can be useful to somebody else.

Usage

The file coverpage.tex is intended for use with the \input command in LaTeX. This corresponds to copy-pasting the code into the .tex file you compile. Note that the command \input{coverpage} substitutes the command \maketitle in your LaTeX root file, otherwise you will have both the title page and the usual title (which depends on the document class you use).

Blank spaces (to be filled in)

The file coverpage.tex is a template. Information displayed in typewriter style (\texttt) surrounded in square brackets must be filled in by the user.

To give an understanding of how to fill in the "blanks," I provide an example with my own data. Italicized words are comments.

• program_name: Economics and Finance
• cycle: 31^st (as I enrolled in a.y. 2015/2016)
• disc_code: SECS-P/01 (one from the set of "settori scientifico-disciplinari")
• adv_name and adv_surname: Basile Grassi
• coa_name and coa_surname: none in my case
• stu_name and stu_surname: Andrea Pasqualini
• stu_idno: 3006510
• Academic Year: 2019/2020 (the one after the last year of enrollment)

Implementation details

The Word file Bocconi offers consists of a single A4 page with left and right margins set to 2 cm and top and bottom margins set to 1 cm. These margins are not set in coverpage.tex and are left for definition somewhere else in the TeX root file the user has.

There are three font sizes: 14 pts as default size, 16 pts for the page header and 22 pts for the thesis title. The following table shows how I matched the font sizes in Word to font sizes in LaTeX. The third column assumes that the \normalsize set in LaTeX is 11 pts.

Word file	LaTeX command	PDF (LaTeX) file
14 pts	\Large	14 pts
16 pts	\LARGE	17 pts
22 pts	\Huge	25 pts

I eyeballed the vertical space in the Word file. I set 1.5 cm of vertical space (\vspace) between the header and the info on the PhD program and between the info on advisors and info on the graduating student. The remaining vertical space is made of elastic space (\vfill) so that the content spans the entire vertical space on the page.

Finally, everything is wrapped in the titlepage environment. This removes the page number from the title page, forces a page break at the end of the environment and resets the page counter so that it starts from 1 on the next page (if any).

Generating preview files

The PDF file in the preview folder is generated with pdflatex. Then I used ImageMagick to convert the PDF file to a PNG file displayed above. In summary

pdflatex preview.tex
convert -density 192 preview.pdf -quality 100 -layers flatten -border 2 -bordercolor black preview.png

where

• -density 192 set rasterized output to 192 pixels per inch
• -quality 100 suppresses any image compression
• -layers flatten prevents white color on PDF from being set to transparent in PNG file
• -border 2 sets a 2-pixel frame around the output image
• -bordercolor black sets the frame color to black

Disclaimer

This repository is in no way endorsed by Bocconi University. Adequacy of the LaTeX source to Bocconi's standards is not guaranteed.

Licensing

This code is released under the Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License (WTFPL).