Template for the University of Bern PhD thesis

This is an unofficial template for the for the GCB of the University of Bern PhD thesis. It uses the EPFL PhD thesis template for the main body of the thesis, and follows the GCB of university of Bern guidelines for the first and last pages (have a look here for the GCB PhD thesis guidelines). This GCB template was also used.

FAQ

The compilation fails: it says "LaTeX Error: Unknown option explicit for package titlesec

The package titlesec has been modified in 2007 to include an option which allows more customization of the chapter titles. This template relies heavily on this option. In order to resolve this, you need to update to a more recent version (either your full Latex-Distribution or at least the titlesec package).

I have a problem with special characters, the compilation fails as soon as there is a special character in my file

For best cross-platform compatibility, the template is configured for "UTF-8" input encoding instead of platform specific encodings (such as "Western-Latin for Mac"). In your Latex-Editor, be sure that the files are saved with this encoding. (In TeX-Shop for Mac: Preferences -> Source-Code -> Encoding -> "UTF-8". You'll need to re-open and save the files in order to make the change happen).

I'm using "mhchem" for typesetting chemical formula and there is a bug in the compilation

This package is under active development: it has been updated on 2011/06/03 to version 3.11 correcting for an incompatibilty with some font-related packages. Please update your Latex-distribution to this latest version of mhchem by downloading the newest version from CTAN and replacing your existing mhchem.sty file by the newer version.

I want to use Tex+dvi for compiling my files, because I have a lot of .eps graphics and I don't want to convert all of them and use pdftex for compiling my files

Never mind for the .eps files: the pdftex compiler is able to convert them automatically to .pdf files. In some configurations you will not even need to do anything besides specifying the full graphic-file-names (ex: "mybeautifuleps.eps"). If this fails, you can still include the epstopdf package manually. The template chapter header styles are unfortunately not (yet) compatible with tex+dvi compilation, so there is really no way around the pdftex compiler at the very moment if you want to use this template.

The compilation fails with the error message "! pdfTeX error (font expansion): auto expansion is only possible with scalable fonts

This error stems from an incompatibility of your system with the font used for the titlepage. We might change this for the whole template design soon, but in the mean time, just open "head/titlepage.tex" -> go to line 4 and put the line in comment by adding a "%" in front of the line such that it reads "%\sffamily". After this the compilation should work.

Another solution to this problem (tested on Windows 10) is the following:

1. Start "MiKTeX Settings (Admin)"
2. Press "Refresh FNDB"
3. Press "Update Formats"
4. Press "OK" (to close the app)
5. Clean auxiliary files (.aux and .out)
6. Recompile and everything should work.

Contributors

• ??? (Original creator)
• Diogo Rodrigues (Fixed latex -> dvips -> ps2pdf version + other minor problems)
• Mahdi Khoramshahhi (Added a fix for the bug on the font expansion)
• Léo Belzile (Changed the logo, tidy up the code, fixed some bugs)
• Stergios Christodoulidis & Tatiana Fountoukidou (merged with the UniBe GCB guidelines)[current version]