latex table in thesis

Overleaf for LaTeX Theses & Dissertations: Home

• Using Templates on Overleaf
• Reference Managers and Overleaf
• Adding Tables, Images, and Graphs

Tips and tools for writing your LaTeX thesis or dissertation in Overleaf, including templates, managing references , and getting started guides.

Managing References

BibTeX is a file format used for lists of references for LaTeX documents. Many citation management tools support the ability to export and import lists of references in .bib format. Some reference management tools can generate BibTeX files of your library or folders for use in your LaTeX documents.

LaTeX on Wikibooks has a Bibliography Management page.

Find list of BibTeX styles available on Overleaf here

View a video tutorial on how to include a bibliography using BibTeX  here

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Collaboration tools

• One version of your project accessible to collaborators via a shared link or email invitation
• Easily select the level of access for collaborators (view, edit, or owner access)
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• Labels help to organize and compare different versions
• Chat in real time with collaborators right within the project

How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX

Writing a thesis or dissertation in LaTeX can be challenging, but the end result is well worth it - nothing looks as good as a LaTeX-produced pdf, and for large documents it's a lot easier than fighting with formatting and cross-referencing in MS Word. Review this video from Overleaf to help you get started writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard thesis template from the Overleaf Gallery .

You can upload your own thesis template to the Overleaf Gallery if your university provides a set of LaTeX template files or you may find your university's thesis template already in the Overleaf Gallery.

This video assumes you've used LaTeX before and are familiar with the standard commands (see our other tutorial videos  if not), and focuses on how to work with a large project split over multiple files.

Add Institutional Library contact info here.

Contact Overleaf   or email [email protected]

5-part Guide on How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX

5-part LaTeX Thesis Writing Guide

Part 1: Basic Structure corresponding  video

Part 2: Page Layout corresponding  video

Part 3: Figures, Subfigures and Tables   corresponding video

Part 4: Bibliographies with Biblatex corresponding video

Part 5: Customizing Your Title Page and Abstract corresponding video

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• Next: Using Templates on Overleaf >>
• Last Updated: May 18, 2021 1:57 PM
• URL: https://overleaf.libguides.com/Thesis

Nick Higham

Applied mathematics, numerical linear algebra and software.

Better LaTeX Tables with Booktabs

I was encouraged to give booktabs a try while I was preparing the third edition of Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences . I redid the tables from the previous edition using the package and, after some experimentation, became convinced that booktabs is indeed a great aid to producing better tables.

The original table did not have the vertical rules at the sides or the horizontal rule at the bottom, but I have added them since many people include them.

Here is a revised version of the table created with booktabs:

The second table dispenses with all the vertical rules and adds two partial horizontal rules to demarcate the span of the pairs of columns covered by the two tol values. Notice the thicker rules at the top and bottom and the greater spacing between lines. The booktabs version of the table is more aesthetically pleasing. It is also slightly easier to typeset. The rules at the top, middle, and bottom are typed with \toprule, \midrule , and \botomrule . The subrules are typed with \cmidrule{m-n} to span columns m to n . The usage \cmidrule(lr){m-n} crops (on the left and right) the rules so that adjacent subrules do not merge.

Here is the source code for the two tables:

Despite my initial skepticism, it does seem possible to manage without vertical rules in tables. Indeed, the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition, 2017) advises that “Vertical rules should be used sparingly—for example, when a table is doubled up … or as an aid to comprehension in an especially long or complex table”. The extra space that booktabs puts around horizontal rules makes the table nicer to look at and helps to avoid the problem of superscripts hitting the rule above. And, importantly, SIAM are happy to for authors to use booktabs in their papers.

For more before-and-after examples of tables, which illustrate table design as well as the use of booktabs, see Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences (third edition, 2020).

One booktab tip that I needed in producing the Handbook was to reduce the space at the edges of some of the widest tables by shortening the horizontal rules. This can be done by putting @{} at the beginning and end of the column formatting argument. For the example above, this is done with

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2 thoughts on “ better latex tables with booktabs ”.

Might I suggest to also use the siunitx package to typeset numbers in a nice “SI” style?

With \usepackage{siunitx} in the preamble the following code looks even nicer:

\begin{tabular}{l S[table-format=5, table-number-alignment = right] S[table-format=1.1e+1] S S[table-format=5, table-number-alignment = right] S[table-format=1.1e+2] S[table-format=2.1, scientific-notation=fixed, round-integer-to-decimal=true, round-mode=places, round-precision=1] }\toprule & \multicolumn{3}{c}{$tol=tols$} & \multicolumn{3}{c}{$tol=told$} \\\cmidrule(lr){2-4}\cmidrule(lr){5-7} & {$mv$} & {Rel.~err} & {Time} & {$mv$} & {Rel.~err} & {Time}\\\midrule trigmv & 11034 & 1.3e-7 & 3.9 & 15846 & 2.7e-11 & 5.6 \\ trigexpmv & 21952 & 1.3e-7 & 6.2 & 31516 & 2.7e-11 & 8.8 \\ trigblock & 15883 & 5.2e-8 & 7.1 & 32023 & 1.1e-11 & 1.4e+1\\ expleja & 11180 & 8.0e-9 & 4.3 & 17348 & 1.5e-11 & 6.6 \\\bottomrule \end{tabular}

The nice thing about is that with the ‘S’ column modifier, one can change the appearance (scientific or non-scientific notation, rounding, … ) so if the results come straight from a code (like Matlab) one doesn’t need to modify the numbers, just the column specifier, to format each column elegantly.

Thanks. I mention siunitx in Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences (third edition). It can be complicated to use so it’s great to have this example.

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because LaTeX matters

Latex table of contents, list of figures/tables and some customizations.

I wrote a somewhat short post on list of figures and list of tables a few years ago. Nevertheless, it gets quite a bit of traffic, possibly due to the large number of comments. For that reason, I decided to put together another, more informative post on the same topic that includes table of contents.

I use the following common abbreviations throughout the post:

• toc: table of contents
• lof: list of figures
• lot: list of tables

Creating content lists, the basic commands

Controlling the depth of content added to toc, adding lof/lot to toc, short captions for lof/lot, linking toc/lof/lot with content using hyperref, further customizations, the tocloft package.

Creating content lists in LaTeX documents is straight forward. Typing these three commands is sufficient to produce a toc, lof, and lot. To produce the lists, the document has to be typeset twice. The first iteration collects all headings and captions and writes them to meta files (*.toc, *.lof, *.lot). The second iteration prints the lists, based on the content of the meta files.

Depending on the document-class employed, page-breaks are added between toc, lof, and lot. Article produces lists without space between them. Report and book insert \clearpage or \cleardoublepage , depending on whether twoside and openright options are set (default for book ), to start each list on a blank page. See here for more details on document-class options.

Depending on the size of your document (length of chapters, sections, etc.), you might want to increase or decrease the level of headings added to toc. To control the depth of content added to toc the counter tocdepth is modified in the preamble as follows:

In the following example all headings are added to toc (level: 5):

Lists of figures and tables are not automatically added to the table of contents. I will introduce two different approaches here, an automatic and a manual approach.

Automatic approach:

Loading tocbibind ( package documentation ) adds entries for lof and lot to toc. In addition, the package adds bibliographies and table of contents itself, by default. This might not always be desirable. Therefore, specific entries can be removed from toc by loading the package with corresponding options, such as: nottoc, notbib, notlof :

Manual approach:

Lof and lot can be added manually through \addcontentsline . The command takes three arguments: the file (e.g. toc), the level (e.g. chapter), and the text to be added.

\listfigurename and \listtablename produce the list headings. This way, toc entries are automatically updated, should the headings be changed for some reason. Adding the lists to toc before the actual command as well as them makes sure the page numbers are set correctly. The document-class option openright (requires twoside in report ) always starts chapters on odd pages, which is when \cleardoublepage comes in handy. It adds either one or two page-breaks depending on whether the content ends on an even or odd page.

Some figures and tables have long captions. It might not always be preferable to reproduce the whole caption in lof/lot. The caption command provides a convenient way to produce a shorter figure/table description in the lof/lot by using its optional argument, without change to the actual figure/table caption.

The same works with headings and table of contents. The \chapter and \section commands also take an optional argument which, when used, produce an alternative chapter/section name in toc.

Loading hyperref ( package documentation ) is generally sufficient to link list entries with document content. With some exceptions , the hyperref package usually has to be loaded last. For a better visualisation of links, it is a good idea to change the link font color, e.g. to blue:

This earlier post describes 10 ways to customize toc/lof/lot, from basic to more advanced topics.

The tocloft package provides means of controlling the typographic design of table of contents, list of figures and list of tables (copied from its documentation ). Introducing the package would go beyond the scope of this article. However, I am happy to help should you have any specific question. Just drop me a comment below.

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116 comments.

13. June 2013 at 11:45

Hi Tom, I would like to ask how could we add a short table of contents which will contain only the chapters’ name.

13. June 2013 at 15:35

Add \setcounter{tocdepth}{0} to your preamble. The tocdepth counter controls the level of headings added to TOC (0: chapter, 1: section, etc.).

12. August 2013 at 15:25

Hi Tom, Excellent article on TOC. One question I have is, is there a way to suppress the toc title, i.e. ‘Contents’ as I am already using a fancyhead

to generate title headers and the toc title overwrites the fancyhead?

13. August 2013 at 15:41

The easiest way would be to redefine the title and leave it empty3:

8. January 2014 at 21:36

I’m using hyperref for my TOC. The issue I have is that the link is only on the chapter title and not the whole line. Because I also would like that if I click on page number, then I’m directed to that page.

Thanks for your support. Rom

10. January 2014 at 15:44

There is an package option which does exactly that. See the hyperref documentation for more details.

22. January 2014 at 23:15

Hi Tom, I need to obtain this on my LOF in the pdf file:

ex: Figure 1 akudfkadgubkadjbvadivbakidbvadivblaidvblaidvblaivblai akbadkvibadlivbadivladivbladivladivbaldivlaihlaidbldibnl aivladivlaidvb……………………………………………………………..1

I’m sorry if became a little confuse but I’m brazilian.

23. January 2014 at 1:43

You’ll have to be a little more specific what your question is about, e.g. no line-breaks in long captions. Please also give a minimal example to illustrate the problem.

Thanks, Tom.

25. July 2014 at 13:23

I think he wants the word “Figure 1.1: A study” instead of “1.1 A study” which I am also trying to do but not yet successful.

25. July 2014 at 14:37

Thanks for the comment. Adding the following two lines does exactly what were looking for:

See here for a few more customizations.

13. June 2017 at 13:47

hi tom i have same problem of adding word figure and table in list of figure and also i need to add “:” after number of figure so i used this code:

but in multilines caption it is not align always seconde ligne start before the “:” if u can help? thanks

13. June 2017 at 15:49

Below is a minimal working example that illustrates how to properly align multi-line text in the list of figures.

14. June 2017 at 13:13

Thanks tom I had another pb of appendix I add new table of content for just appendix

I had perfectly my small toc of appendix but the pb is i want to remove all appendix from principale toc but i cant

26. June 2017 at 15:07

Perhaps you find this Q&A tex.SX useful. In case this doesn’t solve your problem, please provide a minimal working example.

Thanks, Tom

28. February 2014 at 12:46

Hi Tom, I found your blog when I was looking for any answers about how not enumerate the page of lof/lot/loc? \pagestyle{empty} , \thispagestyle{empty} didn’t work as well. Thanks

3. March 2014 at 1:29

Try the following:

28. February 2014 at 21:54

I am trying to follow your example above. I want the LOF and LOT entries in the TOC to be sections. As it is below.. I get two LOF and LOT entries in the TOC (one as a section, one as a chapter) yet the hyperlink on the section entry is wrong??? Thanks

1. March 2014 at 5:43

Thanks for this question. You can use a little trick, by adding phantomsection before addcontentsline , the links are set properly.

1. March 2014 at 18:30

Great thanks Tom. I now have an issue with the sectioning…. The chapters are labeled correctly e.g Chapter 1, Chapter 2… But the sections are also labelled section 1, section 2 … not section 1.1, 1.2

Weirdly the subsections are labelled 1.1 and the figures/tables are also labelled 1.1,1.2 etc

Would really appreciate any help

3. March 2014 at 1:16

It’s the second line of your code where you define sections to be labeled with just the section number instead of chapter and section. Also, delete the last line. I’m not sure why you change it there. Commenting it out should fix the problem. Alternatively, you could replace it with:

Also, please provide a full minimal working example next time. It’s much easier to reproduce your issue that way.

Cheers, Tom.

9. May 2014 at 14:42

Hi Tom, Very useful post! I’ve an extra question. I have a pretty long table of contents that fits on one page and a few lines more on a second page. But spaces between each item are pretty large. Is there a way to reduce them, or an instruction to tell tex to fit the table of contents in one page only? Thank you very much. Pierre-Philippe

9. May 2014 at 18:07

Hi Pierre-Philippe,

If it’s only a few lines, you might use the spacing package:

Possibly a more satisfying alternative is to use the tocloft package and play with, for example, the space before each chapter entry.

Even if there was a way, I wouldn’t recommend forcing TeX to fit the ToC on a single page. What if you decide to add two more chapters a few weeks later…?

17. May 2014 at 12:14

I’m a bit new to this and have had trouble applying these ideas to my table of contents — perhaps because mine is un-numbered? I’m using the book (AMS) document class and have tocloft, and as of now, the “part” and “chapter” entries in the table of contents are set to the same indentation level. I want to make things more obvious and have the “part” entries not indented, but the “chapter” entries intended a bit. Is there any way to do this? I’ve tried throwing some things into the Preamble that I thought might work, but I keep getting error messages about “}” not being there, or there being too many.

If you have any ideas, it would be greatly appreciated! Thanks! ~J.D.

18. May 2014 at 8:25

Thanks for your comment. It seems the ams document classes are not compatible with tocloft . But what you can do is manually redefine how ToC entries are typeset. Here is a MWE to change the chapter indentation:

Hope this helps, Tom

7. August 2014 at 21:32

Hi Tom, Please I’m using the Memor Class and i want that my table of figures be like this : Figure 1.2, Figure 1.3 … and not only 1.2, 1.3 Thank you

11. August 2014 at 5:23

Here is an example:

Please consider the memoir class documentation for more details.

11. August 2014 at 6:37

Thank you for your reply. But using \cftfigurefont requires me using the tocloft package. When i use that package the format of my table of contents changes which I can’t afford to do. Can I do it it without using tocloft package?? Please help.

11. August 2014 at 7:07

This doesn’t require the tocloft package. The tocloft command is \cftfigfont . Memoir provides a lot of flexibility by implementing commands that are provided by packages for the standard classes. Just give the code I posted a try…

11. August 2014 at 8:28

you are asking me to change the class. But that will change the whole format of my thesis which I have compiled according to my university guidelines. Currently I am using a class “ThesisMtech” which I have modified according to my need. I am just not able to get this “Figure 1.1” in place of “1.1” in list of figures and list of tables. Have been trying this for 15 days now. Kindly provide some solution. I can attach my class file if you want. Thank you.

11. August 2014 at 8:54

For some reason I thought you were using the memoir class. I wonder if using tocloft and change the lof/lot style according to your needs might work.

Please prepare a minimal working example and a pointer to where I can get the ThesisMtech class file (ideally the one you modified) and I’ll see what I can do.

29. August 2014 at 6:09

I want to resize heading “List of figure” and “List of tables”, default output using \listoffigure is large list of figure written at the header, I want to align in left side with underline in normal font size. How to do that?

5. September 2014 at 3:05

Hi Ranjana,

Here’s a minimal working example, which uses the tocloft package :

7. October 2014 at 16:57

Hi Tom, whenever I use figure inserting format like below:

and I also use the: \lstinputlisting{fish.m} for importing Matlab codes, there is always a problem; program will not execute, but if I use this format:

it will run and show my Matlab codes and the diagrams. The problem now is that when I try to use the listoffigures or listoftables command to generate my list of figures and list of table respectively, it can not display the list of figures, probably, since the caption command is not used in the

when inserting my my figures. so what do I do to enable diaplay my list of figures and tables.

21. October 2014 at 19:21

You are right, the figure number will only be generated when it is wrapped in a floating environment (i.e. \begin{figure}...\end{figure} ) and has a \caption .

I wasn’t able to reproduce the issue with a Matlab input file (*.m). Could you provide a complete minimal working example. That would make it much easier for me to help.

5. October 2014 at 18:09

First of all thank you for your sharings.

On my report class document content of figures are like here:

Figure 1.1 BWM Car……………………..5 Figure 1.2 Ferrari Car……………………7

But I want a suffix at the end of each number. I want like this:

Figure 1.1. BWM Car……………………..5 Figure 1.2. Ferrari Car……………………7

*see the dot (.) after 1.1

Also this dot (.) should be on each figure explanation. I will be happy if you can help me.

Here is my all document temaplate: http://pastebin.com/UttcnKpY

Thanks in advance.

12. October 2014 at 12:14

All you have to do is add this line to your preamble. It redefines the figure number.

8. October 2014 at 19:01

Hi Tom. Thanks for the article, but I have a question.

My paper have a lot of figures in the same chapter. When I compile the LateX, however, I get Figure number overlaping its title.

I want to increase the spacing between the Figure number and the Figure title. Do you know how I do that?

12. October 2014 at 12:20

The following line of code will add extra space between the number and the caption text through the tocloft package .

24. January 2015 at 22:49

Lemme ask you dear Tom; I have this annoying problem with table of contents: I’m a beginner in Latex. When I add \tableofcontents command, Latex encounters issues with compiling. And I get “Undefined Control Sequence”.. Do I need a use package here or where lies exactly the problem?? Thank you.

14. February 2015 at 6:04

You don’t need to load a package to use \tableofcontents . Thus, the issue is with something else. However, I won’t be able to help without your code. Could you post a minimal working example here.

28. March 2015 at 0:52

Hi Tom, thanks for your post! Anyway, can you tell me how to add more horizontal space between the section’s number and its title? Cheers!

28. March 2015 at 5:30

I assume you are referring to the table of contents. The code below let’s you change the space reserved for the section number. By default, chaptered document classes use 2.3em and others such as article 1.5em . For more details see the tocloft documentation .

7. April 2015 at 12:36

Hi Dear TOm,

My TOC table and figure and table title is too long and it overlap with page numbers , Please guide me , what should I do ? Which code I should Use ??

10. April 2015 at 11:35

Long captions should automatically be wrapped in the list of figures and tables. Please provide a minimal working example for illustration of your problem and I’ll see what I can do…

18. April 2015 at 2:43

In my report, till the table of contents pages are numbered in roman and after that full report is numbered in arabic. But i’m getting only arabic page no.s in the table of contents. Please give the code to solve this. i hope u got my problem

18. April 2015 at 10:18

It’d be easier for me if you sent a minimal working example. Here a code stab that illustrates how you can have roman page numbers in the lists and later arabic page numbers.

7. May 2015 at 17:02

I have used the \addcontentline to include the figures and tables in TOC using the code mentioned here.

I would also additionally like to list in it the TOC itself on the page.

Also if it is of any help, the documentclass of article is used and the cover page, page, appendix are all roman numeral, but the main body of the report is arabic.

I would like to include the TOC in the TOC page itself and also show the roman numerals page number as has been done for the above two sections which were added added.

Please can you kindly suggest what can to be done to this end.

Regards and Thank you, Poulose PS: (Used to work earlier when I used the amsart documentclass)

10. May 2015 at 11:13

Hi Poulose,

Here’s a minimal example that adds the contents heading to the table of contents and uses roman page numbering in the front matter.

3. June 2015 at 19:32

Tom, This is a really useful blog, thanks for setting it up. Here’s my problem: we are using tocloft.sty to generate the TOC, LOF, and LOT. The TOC comes out pretty nice, but there are no “dot leaders” for the main sections (like INTRODUCTION), although there are dot leaders for the subsections. Similarly for the LOF entry in the TOC, i.e., no dot leaders. How can I force LaTeX to include dot leaders on all entries in the TOC?

Also, in the list of figures, the verbiage is bolded, and the report monitors want them unbolded. Can you help with these two issues? Thanks for your time!

3. June 2015 at 23:10

Never mind, I figured it out. The commands below will generate dot leaders for the LOF, the chapter leads, etc.

I found this in another google search.

For unbolding the LOF, just remove \bf from the caption of the figure. Interestingly, the caption is still bolded in the PDF file, but not in the LOF. Perfect.

6. June 2015 at 13:21

Great, thanks for posting your solution!

25. July 2015 at 12:31

it is helpful for us.

19. August 2016 at 19:59

Titles for non-numbered \chapter*{} entries that I add to my toc using \addcontentsline{toc}{chapter} (i.e. abstract, acknowledgements, nomenclature) appear indented compared to numbered chapter{} by about the same length that would be left between the chapter number and title. I would like all chapter titles, numbered or not to be flush with the left margin.

Right now it looks like this:

Table of Contents

Abstract Acknowledgements

List of Tables List of Figures Nomenclature

1 Introduction 2 Literature Review

How can I remove this phantom distance between the left margin and non-numbered chapter titles, while leaving it for numbered chapters?

19. August 2016 at 20:00

Apologies, my indents did not appear once posted.

22. August 2016 at 11:37

No problem, this is not your fault. HTML ignores tabs/whitespace. Best wishes, Tom

22. August 2016 at 11:35

Thanks for your question. I can’t reproduce the issue with the information you provided. In the example below, starred and non-starred chapters are properly aligned. Please provide a minimal working example similar to the one below to illustrate the behavior.

14. September 2016 at 16:07

I am writing a new thesis class for my university project, and I want to change the default chaptername {Chapter 1} to {CHAPTER ONE} with all words capitalized and would like it to be appended to toc as “CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION” for example, how do I go about the renewcommand.

27. September 2016 at 12:10

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your interesting question. The fmtcount package can “spell out” numbers. Below is a minimal working example, which more or less does what you asked for. You might have to change the spacing in the TOC. The tocloft package should do the trick.

Let me know if you have any further question.

9. October 2016 at 10:52

Hi Tom, what a wonderful blog!

I am doing the thesis with tha classicthesis style, but I have introduced the publications at the end of the thesis and it doesn’t appear in the contents. I have included two lines right before \chapter*{publications} :

Now it appears correctly, but when I press the link it doesn’t take me to the publications, but a few pages before.

Also, I have done the same with the abstract but at the begining right after the acronyms. As in the case of the publications the link is incorrect, and at the top, instead of being written “abstract”, “acronyms” is written

11. October 2016 at 10:17

Thanks for getting in touch. It’s difficult to help without seeing some code. Could you please provide a minimal working example.

Btw, you might find the discussion here helpful.

7. November 2016 at 12:59

Hi Tom, How could i create a toc like

ABSTRACT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT — — —

CHAPTER-1 ( 14 BOLD ALL CAP ) CHAPTER TITLE ( 14 BOLD ALL CAP ) …………………………………1 1. 1 SECTION TITLES ( 12 BOLD ALL CAP ) ………………………….3 1.1.1 SUB-SECTION TITLE ( 12 BOLD ALL CAP ) …………………..5

9. November 2016 at 18:32

Thanks for your question. You can patch the list commands to make them uppercase. This is shown here . The font size depends on your document font size. Approximate sizes and the corresponding macro can be found on this page .

2. February 2017 at 2:26

Boa noite. Estou tentando retirar a numeração da págia na lista de figuras, lista de tabelas e sumário. Fica aparecendo a numeração da parte inferior (rodapé) mesmo colocando \thispagestyle{empty}. O que posso fazer? Desde já agradeço.

Good evening. I’m trying to pull a page numbering in a list of figures, a list of tables and a table of contents. The numbering of the bottom (footer) even appears by placing \ thispagestyle {empty}. What can I do? Thank you very much in advance.

5. February 2017 at 11:54

\thispagestyle works for a single page only. Use \pagestyle{empty} instead, as shown in the example below.

9. February 2017 at 21:02

What can be the reason that TOC,LOT,LOF appear in blank, i.e. there is a sheet with their corresponding title, but without entries. I have compiled many times the document, and no different results.

13. February 2017 at 0:15

Please provide a minimal working example and I’ll be happy to take a look.

14. February 2017 at 15:05

My main document is something like this:

[…]Code removed[…]

I don’t know what i am doing wrong, TOC,LOF, and LOT are only sheets with title page but without any other thing. Thanks a lot.

16. February 2017 at 15:41

I removed your code, because it was impossible to debug. I’m happy to help if you provide a minimal working example that I can run on my system.

18. February 2017 at 16:44

What a great and very helpful blog!

My problem refers to the numbering of pages in the table of contents. My table of contents is longer than one page.

When the PDF is created, in the table of contents everything before the toc is page-numbered correctly, but everything after the toc has a wrong page number (lagged). In fact, the number of pages of the toc, lot and lof are not correctly counted, and each is treated as if they were only one page.

The table of contents is 5 pages long, the list of tables is 5 pages long and the list of figures is 3 pages long – and they are counted as if they where only one page long)

So for example what I see in the PDF wrongly shows: Abstract…….5 Table of contents….7 List of Tables….8 List of Figures….9 Introduction…..10

Which is a mistake and it actually should have been: Abstract…….5 Table of contents….7 List of Tables….12 List of Figures….17 Introduction…..20

I’m using this code to produce (unfortunately I wrote my entire thesis using Scientific Workplace which was a big mistake but now it is too late to change)

Could you please help? I’d really appreciate it.

Many Thanks,

Marie-Christine

23. February 2017 at 23:35

Hi Marie-Christine,

Adding the list before creating them should fix the issue (see below). Alternatively, you can also load the tocbibind package. See the documentation for more details. I have no experience with Scientific Workplace, but this Q&A suggests that it shouldn’t be a problem to switch to standard LaTeX.

All the best with your thesis! Tom

30. March 2017 at 2:30

I am using the CSM-Thesis template for my master’s. The template can be easily found on internet. The problem that I have is when my list of figures is generated, the list keeps the long name and any modification that I try to use with \caption does not help at all. You can see the code that the template uses to call the figure and put the long name in the list of figure.

The package used in this is also called \usepackage{csm-thesis} and probably the solution is modifying the code inside the package, but how could I fix this if I am not good coding in latex?

11. April 2017 at 11:50

Thanks for your question. I downloaded the csm-thesis template here . You can’t have a short caption for the list-of-figures using their csmfigure macro. Use the csmlongfigure macro instead, which is defined in csm-thesis.sty . The macro takes 6 arguments, where argument 5 is the short caption and argument 5 + 6 concatenated is the long caption. Here is the example from their template:

I hope this helps, Tom

20. April 2017 at 16:29

Hi Tom, I’m currently writing up my PhD Thesis using amsart, and I have an instance where my subsection is just a maths term. In order to make it boldfont to match all my other subsections, I’m using mathbf, however this makes the entry in the toc also bolded. As far as I can tell, using \subsection[toc name]{in work name} no longer exists, what else can I use? Cheers, Jos

25. April 2017 at 11:25

Thanks for your question. The simplest solution would be to suppress the subsection from being added to the TOC and then add it manually.

28. May 2017 at 15:28

Hi Tom, I have one request. In my thesis I wrote Abstract and Acknowledgments after my title page and beforeTOC while abbreviations after LOT and before the first chapter. Now how to insert Abstract, Acknowledgments, and abbreviations in TOC? I used, for example, \addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{\numberline{}Acknowledgements}..but it yield wrong numbering of Acknowledgements and says that Acknowledgements lie on the same page number as TOC! Any help will be appreciated, Thanks, Ahmed

1. June 2017 at 16:44

Below is a minimal working example that shows how to get the page numbers in the TOC right. Abbreviations works accordingly.

16. July 2017 at 0:08

I need to add two headings(Title, Page) into the table of content page.

Can you suggest a simple method?

24. July 2017 at 14:26

You can use the macro: \addcontentsline{list}{level}{text} . Place the macro before the actual heading.

You’ll find a minimal example below.

25. July 2017 at 20:00

Hi Tom…

In my dissertation, the table of contents heading is showing up on only two pages. It does not show up in the third page. How to add table of contents (continued) in third page. Also in the list of contents bibliography is the last one and it does not have the dots between the content name and the page number. For ex: it should be Bibliography……………90 but it is showing Bibliography 90. How to add the dots between them? Please suggest a simple way. Thanks.

9. August 2017 at 10:25

Please provide a minimal working example to illustrate the problem.

21. September 2017 at 14:10

I have a 2 page TOC, and I want to have a page break between the pages. How can I do that? Any help is appreciated.

26. September 2017 at 19:40

A page break is automatically inserted in the TOC where necessary. Please provide a minimal working example to illustrate the problem.

2. March 2018 at 6:01

my problem is spacing. for example, in chapter 24 of contents table: 24 chapter name 24.9 section name 24.10section name 24.11.1subsection name 24.11.1.1 subsubsection name

as you can see, after certain contents numbers, above 24.10 and 24.11.1, but not 24.11.1.1, there is no space after the numbers.. do you have any suggestions. thanks

21. March 2018 at 15:13

You can increase the length of numwidth defined by the tocloft package to allow for long numbers. You would have to do that for each heading level separately (I picked an arbitrary length of 5em). See the tocloft documentation for more details.

10. March 2018 at 20:24

Hi Tom, Thanks for the post. I want to add space between the entries in LoC, LoT and LoF. Can you please help me with this using tocloft package.

21. March 2018 at 15:02

Thanks for your question. Try changing the following parameter defined by the tocloft package :

If that is not what you were looking for, please provide a minimal working example to illustrate your problem.

23. May 2018 at 15:11

Hi Tom, How to put one line above and one line below ‘Content’, something like:

—————– Content —————–

23. June 2018 at 16:39

Hi Yanpeng,

Sorry for the late response. You could simply change the title by adding a line above and below.

26. September 2018 at 20:02

Hi, I have a question, in my contents in thesis the list of content of tables and figure is large, so that , I want to break the line in list of content….please help me ….

28. October 2018 at 10:06

Please provide minimal working example and I will be happy to make a suggestion.

Cheers, Tom

3. October 2018 at 9:56

Is it possible to set a background picture in all the pages of the TOC?

I have tried with package ‘background’. The best I manage it to have it in the first and in the last pages of the TOC but not in all.

Thanks for your response.

28. October 2018 at 10:05

Thanks for your question. If you provide a minimal working example, I would be happy to look at what you tried so far. In general, my approach would be similar to what David suggests here using \AddToShipoutPicture and \ClearShipoutPicture.

Regards, Tom

9. November 2018 at 11:25

Thank you for such a wonderful forum. I have a question regarding table of contents.

I am using \tableofcontents to generate the contents for my thesis report. However, the first item on the Contents page is ‘Content’ with page number in roman. It is not desirable to have the ‘Contents’ heading on the Contents page. I want to exclude it and wants the first heading be the next chapter, say, ‘List of Symbols’.

Kindly suggest a solution or a way around this.

5. December 2018 at 14:43

Hi Prasoon,

Thanks for your question. Use the tocbibind package to control what should be included in your contents list. See the package documentation for a full list of options.

12. December 2018 at 3:26

Hi Tom, How I could include te code so the Index (Table of Contents) is showed in the tree index at the left of the pdf navigator. I mean how to create the table of Concents (toc) marker? THANKS a lot, your post it is quite helpful

18. December 2018 at 23:37

Thanks for your question. Is PDF Navigator the viewer you use? I’m not familiar with that software. In any case, see if loading the hyperref package solves your problem. That’s all I can think of at this point.

19. April 2019 at 7:59

Hai TOM, using \usepackage{tocloft} I am getting Table of contents, list of figures and list of tables headings to the left. how can i adjust it to center. one more problem is how to avoid the dotted lines in the list of contents and figures, tables.

Kindly suggest a solution

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page No ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . i ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii LIST OF FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xii LIST OF TABLES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii ABBREVIATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiv NOTATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvi 1 INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 Characteristics of Cognitive Radio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.1.1 Cognitive Capability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

22. April 2019 at 9:31

Hi Sudhamani,

The minimal example below shows how to center the titles and remove the dots using the tocloft package .

22. April 2019 at 17:12

Hi Tom , i have two listings in my work , that’s why i don’t want to create a whole table of listings for them so i was wondering is there a way to put them (mix them with ) in the list of tables , but still clearly define them as listings

22. April 2019 at 22:40

Below is my suggestion on how to add your listings to the list of tables. Just use the table environment. There are other ways of course, but this is relatively simple and lets you reference the listings the same way you reference tables.

10. May 2019 at 11:13

Thank you for your post, it was helpful. However I don’t know how to change the title of the table of contents, it says “Contents” and I want to change it to my lenguage. Can you help me?

Thank you in advanced

28. May 2019 at 22:22

If you change the document to your language using babel, the heading should change accordingly. See the package documentation for a list of supported languages (recommended). Alternatively, you can change the headings manually.

Ie. for Spanish use:

10. May 2019 at 16:27

I’m writing my thesis and I have a problem with chapter numbering. I want the captions of my chapters to be: “1. Blablabla”. I used the code below to achieve this. The problem is that my toc (and lof and lot) now have a “0” in front of them. I would like the captions of these 3 chapters just to include the name, not a number. Is this possible?

Thank you in advance,

28. May 2019 at 22:14

Sorry for the late response. To clarify a few things. Toc/lof/lot are unnumbered chapters (\chapter*{}), meaning that the counter is not increased when you print them. This explains why when you print the chapter counter before the chapter name, it is zero at the beginning of your document. You can manually increase the counter with \stepcounter{chapter} . Not sure I understand what you are trying to achieve, though. Should your lists (toc/lof/lot) be numbered, but the toc entries should be unnumbered?

30. May 2019 at 22:27

Hi I am writing thesis in latex and now from this .tex file i want to have a pdf file in which front matter, table of contents to be appeared without having chapters. Is there any possibility? In short i want i want to hide all the chapters but without hiding from table of contents

30. May 2019 at 22:50

Thanks for your question. There are different ways to do that, not necessarily related to LaTeX. Below are two possibilities. Alternatively, you can manually generate table of content entries with \addcontentsline . But it seems an awful lot of work if you can get what you want much easier. Also, the page numbers would obviously be wrong.

1) You can typeset the entire document and delete all pages after table of contents. If you are on a Mac, Preview does the trick. Select the pages to delete from the thumbnails on the left and press delete. I am sure PDF readers on other system have similar functionality. 2) A more Texy option is to typeset the entire document. Then use the pdfpages package to create a document with the first few pages of your thesis.

31. May 2019 at 3:36

Thanks Tom, the second option works. But the first does not. Anyhow my problem is solved. Thanks once again.

31. May 2019 at 22:14

Great, thanks for letting me know. Best, Tom

20. June 2019 at 10:09

Hi Tom I have one more question , I want to set the font size of chapter(20), heading(18), subheading(16) and subsubheading(14) and the default text size as 12 in my thesis. can you please tell how to do this. secondly i want my chapter heading in center. hoping for your response. Thanks

20. June 2019 at 21:13

Hello Dimple,

Please take a look at the titlesec package . You should be able to get the formatting through the titleformat command.

3. March 2020 at 16:14

hello need help on how to get rid of one before introduction in the table of contents generated example ONE INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Characteristics of Cognitive Radio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Cognitive Capability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

27. April 2020 at 21:40

You can produce chapters without numbering using \chapter*{INTRODUCTION} . If that does not solve your problem, please provide a minimal working example.

28. January 2022 at 0:29

Hi Tom, I use documentation class. How can I remove listoffigures and listoftables from the contents? Thanks a lot

14. April 2023 at 0:03

Use the tocbibind package with the following options:

\usepackage[notlof,notlot]{tocbibind}

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How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 5): Customising Your Title Page and Abstract

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Author: Josh Cassidy (August 2013)

This five-part series of articles uses a combination of video and textual descriptions to teach the basics of writing a thesis using LaTeX. These tutorials were first published on the original ShareLateX blog site during August 2013; consequently, today's editor interface (Overleaf) has changed considerably due to the development of ShareLaTeX and the subsequent merger of ShareLaTeX and Overleaf. However, much of the content is still relevant and teaches you some basic LaTeX—skills and expertise that will apply across all platforms.

In the previous post we looked at adding a bibliography to our thesis using the biblatex package . In this, the final post of the series, we're going to look at customising some of the opening pages. In the first video we made a rather makeshift title page using the \maketitle command and by using an \includegraphics command in the \title command. Although this works, it doesn't give us as much flexibility as we may want.

The Title Page

A much better way to do this is to use the titlepage environment. We'll do this in a separate .tex file and then input it. The first thing we'll do is enclose everything in the title page within the center environment so it's all aligned to the centre. Next we need to instruct L a T e X to leave a gap between the top of the page and the first line of text. To do this we use the \vspace command followed by a length. We also need to add an asterisk into the command to make sure L a T e X doesn't decide to ignore the command. Next we'll add the thesis title in bold font using the \textbf command. To leave a gap between this and the next line of text we use the \vspace command again, this time without the asterisk. Next we'll add in a subtitle followed by some more vertical space and then the author name in bold font. This concludes what we want at the top of the title page—the rest of the content we'll add at the bottom of the title page.

To separate these two sections out we'll use the \vfill command which will automatically add in the amount of vertical space needed for the content to fill the page. Next we'll add in a line of text to specify what degree the thesis is being submitted for. The double backslash is used to create a new line. We'll then add more space before adding in the university logo specifying it's width as a fraction of the text width. Finally we'll add in some information about the university and the date.

Now in the main .tex file we can replace the \maketitle command with an input command linked to our new title page. If we now compile the code we can see all the items have been correctly processed:

However, the text is quite small so we'll go back and change the font sizes. To do this we'll use one of the simple font-sizing commands. There are ten of these to choose from, ranging from smallest to largest they are:

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The abstract

We can also customise other pages, such as the abstract. Instead of using an unnumbered chapter, we'll create a new .tex file, customise the layout and then input it. At the top of this file we need to change the page style to plain in order to stop the headers being added in. Now in a similar way to the title page we'll add in some custom titles and then the abstract text.

This is what it will look like added in:

This concludes our series on writing a basic thesis. If you want to play around with the thesis we've created in this series you can open the project in Overleaf .

All articles in this series

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How do I format table of contents in my thesis?

I am writing my thesis using my university's (Universiti Teknologi Malaysia) latex template. I have a problem with the table of contents. My working trial is as follows:

which produces a table of contents that looks like this:

I want my table of contents that looks like this one:

Please help.

• table-of-contents

• For chapter title see Werner answer . For page number title add \addtocontents{toc}{~\hfill{Title}~\hfill\textbf{Page}\par} after \tableofcontents . –  user108724 Commented Apr 11, 2020 at 12:58

To get the sections in front of the main text included you either have to add them to the TOC manually \addcontentsline{file}{sec_unit}{entry} , here file =toc, or you divide your document in 3 parts using

This will automatically include the chapters/sections in between \frontmatter and \mainmatter in the TOC without numbering them. In this case, you don't use the * when adding the respective \chapter s.

How to include the "CHAPTER" in front of the Chapter headings is described here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/279319/189246

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