ARCHIVING YOUR THESIS

From now on, all students producing theses/dissertations in the School of Informatics are being asked to produce an electronic archive of their write-ups (called "theses" in the following). These theses are an extremely valuable resource for other researchers and for students doing projects in the future. An electronic archive will enable them to make a much better contribution than does the current, rather sporadic, method of keeping paper copies.

The list of archived PhD theses can be viewed at the Edinburgh Research Archive.

There may be some people who have especially good reasons why their theses cannot or should not be made part of an electronic archive. Those people should ensure that their supervisor and the ITO know the special reasons.

You are asked to make an archive of your thesis in PDF format as follows:

1. Create the PDF file

Convert your thesis to Postscript

If your thesis was written in latex then produce the dvi version of the thesis using latex and then use dvips as follows to produce a file <thesis>.ps.

    $ latex <thesis>.tex
    $ dvips -Ppdf <thesis>.dvi

If you didn't use latex (for example if you used Word on a PC) then save a version of your thesis in Postscript format. (This is the normal 'print-to-file' format which uses the extension .prn, by default.)

Convert the Postscript version of your thesis to PDF

Produce a version of your thesis in PDF format using:

    $ pst2pdf <thesis>.ps

This should produce a file <thesis>.pdf in the same directory.

N.B. For students still using Sun Solaris, pstopdf is preferable to ps2pdf.

Alternatively, convert your thesis directly to PDF

If your thesis was written in latex you can either:

Produce the dvi version of the thesis as above and then use dvipdf to convert it directly to pdf: (Note, this will produce bitmap fonts which don't view so well on the web)

    $ dvipdf <thesis>.dvi

or:

Use pdflatex to convert your thesis directly from latex to pdf as follows:

    $ pdflatex <thesis>.tex

Both the above will produce a file <thesis>.pdf in the same directory.

Note that eps graphics files have to be converted to pdf, using epstopdf for example, before being included in a file that undergoes pdflatex. Also, pdflatex can't deal with raw postscript as produced by pstricks.

Bear in mind that if you are trying to compile into both ps and pdf and are using \includegraphics from the graphics package, you can omit the suffix on the graphics file. Then dvips will pick a .ps file and pdflatex will pick a .pdf file.

2. Archive the PDF

For PhD theses:

All PhD theses are now included in the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA), a digital repository of research produced at The University of Edinburgh.

Students who started their study after 1 September 2005 are required to submit both paper and electronic versions of the final thesis to the College of Science & Engineering, click here for more information. The electronic version is automatically uploaded to the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA).

Students who started study before 1 September 2005 are not required to submit an electronic version but are strongly encouraged to do so.

If you are not required to, and have chosen not to, submit an electronic version of your thesis to College then you must submit a PDF version of your thesis directly to the Library for inclusion in the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) as follows:

Go to the Informatics Theses part of ERA.
Click on your institute's name.
Click "Submit to this collection".
Register as a user.
Fill in the information requested about your thesis, and submit your PDF file.

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