PhD thesis template – Norwegian Open AI Lab

Yet another template for your PhD Thesis, with NAIL's logo on the cover page and a few other aesthetic enhancements 😁

Credits and alternative templates

This template is based on Bart's Unofficial NTNU Thesis Template, which was mainly based on an old template from Martin Helsø at UiO.

I also took some inspiration from the cover page of NTNU's HPC-Lab Thesis Template.

You should definitely check out all the templates at Overleaf, including the one that almost everyone use from CoPCSE, as well as the one by Bjørn Magnus (which folk at NorwAI tend to use).

Why should I use this template?

This template is, as all the others listed above, just a starting point. You might (and ultimately will) end up with your own version after all the adjustments. That is precisely what I liked about Bart's template—it is a very verbose template, where you manually specify what you want, with very few additions and overheads on top of the content. In general, this ends up being a bit more extensive but producing—in my opinion—cleaner results.

Key differences with other templates

• Uses an updated (2025) version of NTNU's logo
• This template uses the Latin Modern font (provided by the lmodern package)
• The font is slightly larger (11pt instead of 10pt)
• The margins are wider than Bjørn Magnus's, but narrower than Bart's (after Bart's suggestion!)
  • Bart's: \setlrmarginsandblock{20mm}{28.7mm}{*}
  • Our setting: \setlrmarginsandblock{24mm}{28.7mm}{*}
  • Bjørn Magnus's: \setlrmarginsandblock{25mm}{28.7mm}{*}
• Titles are typeset in sans serif
• As opposed to Bart's, this template includes thumbs for each publication (like Bjørn Magnus's)
• Thumbs are thinner (0.5cm down from 1cm)
• Thumbs use Roman numerals
• Similar to Bart's and Bjørn Magnus's templates, papers are included in .tex format. You typeset them in a B5 paper, as opposed to embbeding the PDFs directly (as in CoPCSE's).
• As opposed to Bjørn Magnus's template, you are in charge of adapting the content and layout of the papers (instead of copy/pasting your old .tex files and switching between compilation modes)
• Uses multiple .bib files

Updated packages

• Replaced the ancient algorithm2e for the newer (and easier to use) algpseudocodex package
• mathptm is deprecated, and we use newtx instead
• I switched from multibib (which was a mess) to BibLaTeX which is way more flexible and modern