Udinus Thesis Template (LaTeX)
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
Microsoft Word is a fine tool for a one-page memo. For a 100+ page thesis with nested numbering, cross-references, a bibliography, and appendices? It is a constant maintenance burden. The breaking point was realizing I had spent more time fighting formatting than writing actual content. I needed a system where content and presentation are separated — write first, format later, and never fight over page breaks again.
LaTeX Architecture
LaTeX is fundamentally different from Word: you write plain text with logical markup, and the compiler handles layout, numbering, cross-references, and bibliographies automatically. 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 a 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.
MCP arXiv Integration
The most tedious part of thesis writing is managing references. I integrated MCP arXiv directly into the reference workflow. Instead of opening 50 browser tabs to find BibTeX entries, a query to the arXiv API returns citation metadata pre-formatted — directly from the source. No journal pages, no paywalls, no copy-paste typos. This single change reduced bibliography assembly from hours to minutes.
Impact
The template has been forked 2 times and adopted by fellow students facing the same Word frustrations. Feedback has ranged from "I wish I had this last semester" to feature requests for specific Udinus format variations. This template taught me something: the most impactful engineering is not always the most technically complex. A collection of configuration files may save more collective hours for peers than anything else I have built.