Building a LaTeX Thesis Template After Getting Frustrated with Word

It started with a Table of Contents. I had just finished revising Chapter 4 of my thesis — adding a few more sections, adjusting some subheadings. I clicked "Update Field" on the ToC, and suddenly every page number shifted. The dedication page was now on page 3 instead of page 2. The abstract spilled into the acknowledgments. Forty-five minutes of manual tweaking to fix what a single paragraph addition had broken. That was the moment I decided: never again.

The Word Breaking Point

Let me be clear: Microsoft Word is a fine tool for writing a one-page memo or a team report. For a 100+ page thesis with nested numbering, cross-references, a bibliography, and appendices? It is a constant maintenance burden. The list of grievances is long: expensive licenses that expire, styles that mysteriously reset, images that wander to the next page unprompted, numbering that follows its own logic, and collaborative editing that turns into format-wrestling.

The breaking point was realizing I had spent more time fighting formatting than writing actual content. For a thesis that demands academic rigor, this felt absurd. I needed a system where content and presentation are separated — write first, format later, and never fight over page breaks again.

Enter LaTeX: Content-First, Format-Last

LaTeX is not just "Word without the GUI." It is a fundamentally different philosophy: you write plain text with logical markup (section{Introduction}, cite{key2024}), and the compiler handles layout, numbering, cross-references, and bibliographies automatically. No clicking, no dragging, no fighting.

I built the template around XeLaTeX (for native Times New Roman support — mandatory for Udinus guidelines), Biber for bibliography processing, and latexmk for one-command compilation. The structure follows the modular thesis format: preamble/ for configuration, frontmatter/ for cover and abstracts, chapters/ for content, backmatter/ for appendices. A single ./compile.sh produces a consistently formatted PDF — every time, identical on any machine.

A Small Integration That Made a Big Difference

The most tedious part of thesis writing is managing references. The typical workflow: find a paper on Google Scholar → click through to the journal → scroll past ads and paywalls → find the BibTeX entry → copy-paste → repeat 50 times. It takes hours and invites formatting errors in every step.

I integrated MCP arXiv directly into my reference workflow. Instead of opening 50 browser tabs, I query the arXiv API with a paper ID — the citation metadata (authors, title, year, DOI, pages) comes back pre-formatted in BibTeX, directly from the source. No journal pages. No paywalls. No copy-paste typos. The reference manager in VS Code auto-completes citations as I type. This single change made bibliography assembly much faster — from hours to minutes.

Open Source: Sharing the Fix

I released the template on GitHub under Apache 2.0. It has since been adopted by a few fellow students who were facing the same Word frustrations. Their feedback helped improve it in ways I hadn't thought of on my own.

Looking back, this template taught me something: the most useful tools are not always the most complex. Lectura and Maestro are more technically involved, but this LaTeX template — a collection of configuration files — may have saved more collective hours for my peers than anything else I have built. Sometimes the best tool is the one that eliminates a recurring frustration that everyone has learned to tolerate.