THE USFDISSERTATION CLASS FILE

This is a contribution to the arduous task of writing
a dissertation for the University of South Florida. It
is dubious that it can be applied on other campuses, 
but, as with all things \TeX, you are welcome to give 
it a try.

For those with minimal LaTeX or TeX exposure, there are
several things to keep in mind. First, LaTeX is not a
word processor, but an electronic typography tool with
useful document organization features.

You create your document in some kind of simple or fancy
TEXT processing program, and save this file with the 
extension .tex. Then you "run latex on it" which means
either you get your program to handle this for you, or
you open a command-line interface (terminal on systems
blessed with some open or not so open brand of Unix 
operating system, or Start->All Programs->Accessories->
Command Prompt on systems cursed with a Windows XP 
operating system) and type:

         latex myfile.tex

Finally, you open the myfile.dvi file created by the 
latex processor, assuming everything goes smoothly,
and view the document you have created. The most common
viewer in Windows is yap, and the most historic unix
one is xdvi. It is to be emphasized that only then do
you know what your document might look like!

But perhaps you have all this before, and hope to 
avoid some of the details of it with this file collection.
A common error for those who desperately need to use
LaTeX, but are relying on their experience with something 
like MS Word, is the following: one hastily takes hold of 
the file in this collection called "USFDisserationTemplate.tex" 
and starts filling it in with the text of one's promising
dissertation.

This unfortunately will not work as expected.
You need to understand that the actual creation of 
formats, page sizes, and so forth, is performed by
the only file in this collection that is an adjunct
to the LaTeX system proper, namely, USFDissertation.cls.
To run it properly, you MUST acquire enough facility
with your computer to do the following:

1) create a "USFDissertation" sub-directory of the 
/tex/latex sub-directory of your \TeX installation. 

2) Copy these files into that sub-directory. 

3) Run the necessary program to refresh
the file-name database for your \TeX installation.
This is famously the program "texhash" on most Unix
-like systems, and in MiKTeX, on Windows, you click
Start->All Programs->MiKTeX->Settings and seek out the 
FNDB update and refresh functions in the dialog box
that opens.

After this, you are free to create your own .tex file
anywhere on your system, or else to use the outline 
provided in "USFDissertationTemplate.tex" as a starting
point. To do this, copy it to the directory where you
plan on doing your work and change the name to something
more attractive. But, above all, preserve the .tex 
extension to the file name!

Finally, maybe you can figure it all out by just inspecting
that "USFDissertationTemplate.tex" file -- but I doubt it.
To find out the options available, and what the different
commands mean PLEASE read the documentation
("UsingUSFDissertation.pdf"). In addition, should you have
experience with all of this, it would be kind of you to
share that experience -- plus any advice you might want 
to add -- about the further construction of \TeX documents. 

These can be added as postscripts to this file, or, better
yet, into the Documentation itself.

Note as well that the stern words "it won't work if you
try filling in the template!" are not strictly true, as
the .cls file may also live in the same directory as your
.tex file. This practice is strongly discouraged, as damage
to your dissertation may be fixable (by you) but damage to
the .cls file is probably not so simple.

Use the proper \TeX methods, for the best possible results.

Best of luck in your TeXing! -- DEK

--David Kephart
  4/1/07