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James Bray's Latex Help - General
Latex > General

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With a big document like a thesis, directory organisation is the key to success. Otherwise, it is very easy to end up in a confused mess!

I created a master thesis directory and then chapter directories within this directory. Each chapter directory e.g. chapter1 then contains a minimum of two other directories, latex (for the latex files!) and figures (for the figure files!)

Basic Directory Structure For Each Chapter:

/home/bsm/james/thesis
/home/bsm/james/thesis/chapter1
/home/bsm/james/thesis/chapter1/figures
/home/bsm/james/thesis/chapter1/latex

Within the figure directory EACH different figure has it's own directory. This is important because each figure will have several files associated with it. It is best to keep all this together in one specific directory.

I would recommend using a descriptive naming scheme for these figure directories i.e. name the directory after the figure itself e.g. hmm or venn_diagram. This makes it easier to find figures than calling the directories figure1, figure2 etc. Writing your thesis will be hard enough without having to remember what figure1 in chapter1 looks like! Also, figures tend to move around as you write your thesis, so it is better not to define the number of each figure (let latex do that for you later..)

Basic Directory Structure For Each Figure:

/home/bsm/james/thesis/chapter1/figures/hmm
/home/bsm/james/thesis/chapter1/figures/venn_diagram
/home/bsm/james/thesis/chapter1/figures/integrate

In general you have to observe the following sequence of operations: latex, bibtex, latex, latex and dvips.

Go to the directory where the .tex files are (e.g. chapter1/latex). Remove old postscript files (.ps), dvi files (.dvi) and old bibliography files (.bbl). Obviously *DO NOT* remove the latex files (.tex).