A Typst template for a Stanford Ph.D. dissertation or Engineer thesis, built to the Office of the University Registrar’s published format requirements.

This template is not endorsed by Stanford. The Registrar states: “The Office of the University Registrar does not endorse or verify the accuracy of any dissertation or thesis formatting templates that may be available to you. It is your student responsibility to make sure that the formatting meets these requirements.” Read the requirements yourself before you submit. REQUIREMENTS.md maps every clause to what this template does, and lists what it cannot do for you.

Getting started

typst init @preview/cardinal-su-thesis
cd cardinal-su-thesis
typst watch main.typ

The generated project is a complete example dissertation — abstract, acknowledgements, preface, introduction, a chapter exercising every feature, conclusions, an appendix, and a bibliography. Compile it, read it, then replace the content with your own.

What you get out of the box

• US letter, 1.5 in binding margin, 1 in elsewhere, alternating for double-sided printing
• 10 pt New Computer Modern (on the Registrar’s acceptable-families list, and bundled with Typst so nothing needs installing)
• One-and-a-half line spacing, measured at 1.502× the font size
• Roman preliminary numerals with the Abstract on iv, Arabic restarting at 1 at Chapter 1, in a consistent position throughout
• No copyright or signature page — Axess inserts those, and leaving them in is the single most common formatting mistake
• Title page generated to match the official samples word for word
• Chapter-prefixed figures, tables, and equations (Figure 2.1, Table 2.1, equation (2.1)), each on its own counter, all resetting per chapter
• Running heads that abbreviate long chapter titles
• Supplementary notes, supplementary table stubs, and numbered methods subsections, all cross-referenceable

Document structure

main.typ applies three show rules in sequence, which switch numbering modes:

#show: front-matter   // unnumbered headings, Roman page numbers
#show: main-body      // numbered chapters, Arabic page numbers restarting at 1
#show: appendix       // letter-numbered headings (A, A.1, ...)

Chapters live in their own files and are pulled in with #include. Because #include does not share scope, each chapter file needs its own import line:

#import "@preview/cardinal-su-thesis:0.1.0": *

Recipes

Each snippet shows only the options it is about; combine them with the rest of your own thesis.with call.

Open a chapter

#chapter-title[Chapter 2]
= The full chapter title, which may be long

chapter-title prints the unnumbered label and inserts the page break and vertical drop; the = heading supplies the numbered title. To keep a long title out of the running head, pass a short form:

#chapter-title(short: [Regulatory maps])[Chapter 2]
= Mapping enhancer-gene regulatory interactions from single-cell data

A figure with a short title and a long legend

caption: is what lands in the List of Figures, so keep it to a short title and put the description in fig-legend immediately after. The caption is printed above the legend on the page, so don’t repeat the title in the legend:

#figure(
  image("figures/results.jpg", width: 90%),
  caption: [Benchmarking across five cell types],
) <fig-bench>
#fig-legend[
  *(a)* Precision-recall curves.
  *(b)* Effect sizes by distance bin ($n = 1{,}204$).
]

Panel markers in the legend are written plainly as *(a)*, since the caption above already carries the figure number. To name a panel from running text, use figpanel: figpanel(<fig-bench>, [a]) renders as Figure 2.1a and stays correct if the chapter is reordered. Reference the figure itself with @fig-bench.

Cite a reference by number in running prose

as reviewed in ref.~#refnum(<Gasperini2020>)

refnum puts the citation number on the baseline instead of superscripting it. The ~ is a non-breaking space.

Supplementary notes, tables, and methods

#supp-note[Naming conventions][
  Body of the note, which may run across pages.
] <supp-note-naming>

#supp-table(
  [Model parameters],
  [One row per parameter.],
  filename: "TableA1_parameters.tsv",
) <supp-tab-params>

#method-heading[Sample preparation] <method-prep>

These print as Note A.1, Table A.1, and A.1. Sample preparation, each on its own counter, and are referenced with @supp-note-naming, @supp-tab-params, and @method-prep — the last resolving to Methods A.1.

Switch to an Engineer thesis

#show: thesis.with(degree: "engineer")

A program rather than a department

#show: thesis.with(program: "Biophysics")   // "SUBMITTED TO THE PROGRAM IN BIOPHYSICS"

GSB, GSE, Law (J.S.D.), or D.M.A. title pages

Stanford publishes five Ph.D. title page variants. The department and program forms are built in; for the other three, override the block between the title and your name with the exact lines from the official samples:

#show: thesis.with(
  title-page-lines: (
    "A Dissertation",
    "Submitted to the Graduate School of Business",
    "and the Committee on Graduate Studies",
    "of Stanford University",
    "in partial fulfillment of the requirements",
    "for the degree of",
    "Doctor of Philosophy",
  ),
)

Single-sided printing

#show: thesis.with(double-sided: false)

The binding margin stops alternating and stays on the left, and running heads stop mirroring. Pagination is unaffected — the Abstract is on iv either way.

Options

All are keyword arguments to thesis.

Identity

Layout

Typography

Title page

Headings

Both defaults are exported, so you can tweak one level:

#show: thesis.with(
  heading-styles: default-heading-styles.enumerate().map(((i, s)) =>
    if i == 0 { s + (size: 22pt) } else { s }),
)

Running heads and pagination

Figures, tables, and equations

Verifying your output

tests/check.py compiles the example and asserts 35 properties against the compiled PDF — page box, both margins by page parity, title-page margins under a wrapping title, measured line spacing, folio inset, the iv start, the Arabic restart, section order, per-kind counters and labels, font embedding, encryption, and file size. It also parses every typst block in this README, the way typst/packages CI does:

python3 tests/check.py

It needs typst on PATH and pypdf. Point it at your own document by editing the path at the top. It is a safety net, not a substitute for reading the requirements.

Gotchas

Show-rule alignment. lib.typ sets show figure: set align(center), which wraps the entire show-rule chain. Any block returned by a later show figure: it => .. rule is therefore placed inside a centred context. Two consequences, both worked around in lib.typ:

1. set align(left) must come before the block, at branch level. Putting it inside the block’s content only affects the text, not the block’s own placement, so a block narrower than the text column ends up centred.
2. block(breakable: true, ..) is not enough when the content holds a large unbreakable child such as an enum. The block can break between children, but an oversized child still overflows. Return a flat content sequence with set block(breakable: true) in scope instead of wrapping it.

Scope supplements per figure kind. A bare set figure(supplement: [Figure]) relabels every figure kind, tables included. lib.typ therefore applies figure-supplement and table-supplement through show figure.where(kind: ..): set figure(..), and the cross-reference rule reads each label off it.element.kind so a table reference counts on the table counter.

Don’t name a parameter numbering. It shadows the builtin numbering() function. main-body and appendix take heading-numbering for this reason.

A bare @ in text. On Typst 0.13 an @ followed by punctuation parses as a label reference and fails the build. Write it as `@` or \@.

Requirements

Typst 0.13.0 or later. The example compiles cleanly on 0.13.0, 0.14.0, and 0.15.0, with the same pagination and every page’s text laid out within 1 pt of the same position. One thing does differ: Typst’s bundled Nature bibliography style gained editor and publisher details for book chapters in 0.15.0, so those entries are fuller on newer compilers.

Developing locally

git clone https://github.com/mayasheth/cardinal-su-thesis
mkdir -p "$HOME/Library/Application Support/typst/packages/preview/cardinal-su-thesis"
ln -s "$PWD/cardinal-su-thesis" \
  "$HOME/Library/Application Support/typst/packages/preview/cardinal-su-thesis/0.1.0"
typst init @preview/cardinal-su-thesis:0.1.0 /tmp/demo
cd /tmp/demo && typst compile main.typ

On Linux the package directory is ~/.local/share/typst/packages/preview/….

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.

License

MIT-0, so anything you write with the template is yours with no attribution or license-text obligations. See LICENSE.

The bundled example figures are synthetic images generated for this repository, and the entries in template/refs.bib are fictitious.