by Edgar D. Klenske
it is not important to accumulate knowledge
it is important to share it
Several times during the preparation of my thesis, I saw a beautifully designed PhD Thesis of someone else and wondered: How did they do it? I never heared back from anyone I wrote to, since usually university email addresses decay quickly.
I invested many hours of my life in preparing this thesis. If ever someone stumbles upon it and wonders how I did something, I would like to help out by sharing. If it helps anyone to save just a couple of hours in preparing their thesis, it was worth uploading.
The thesis heavily relies on TikZ and pgfplots. It will take forever to
compile, at least with current CPUs. Recent versions of texlive can cache the
TikZ images for fast compiliation. However, this only works if the pdf is
compiled with pdflatex -shell-escape thesis.tex. Anyway, the first run will
take very long.
While I hopefully achieved a good style for of the compiled document, the source code would not comply to any software engineering guidelines. There are things that are not nice, there are things that are questionable, and there are things that are outright ugly. The source code is provided as is and I am not responsible if something goes terribly wrong due to the use of my thesis.
Personally, I would see this thesis as a creative work and would license it as Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. However, since what's shared is the code, and the code contains parts from different style templates, packages and so on, I don't know whether licensing as CC is actually possible.
If the source code of my thesis somehow helped you to achieve your goals, I would be thankful if you could let me know. Either by adding a little note to your thesis, by sending me an email or by buying me a cup of coffee if you meet me at a conference.