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This is a TAU thesis template written in the typst typesetting language, a potential successor to LaTeΧ. The version of Typst used to test this template is 0.14.0. See the Typst tutorial for basic instructions on how Typst is used.

Using the template on typst.app

This template is also available on Typst Universe as scholarly-tauthesis. Simply create an account on https://typst.app/ and start a new scholarly-tauthesis project by clicking on Start from template and searching for scholarly-tauthesis.

If you have initialized your project with an older stable version of this template and wish to upgrade to a newer release, the simplest way to do it is to change the value of $VERSION ≥ 0.9.0 in the import statements

#import "@preview/scholarly-tauthesis:$VERSION" as tauthesis

to correspond to a newer released version. Alternatively, you could download the tauthesis.typ file from the thesis template repository, and upload it into your project on https://typst.app/. Then use

#import "path/to/tauthesis.typ" as tauthesis

instead of

#import "@preview/scholarly-tauthesis:$VERSION" as tauthesis

to import the tauthesis module.

Note

Versions of this template before 0.9.0 do not actually work with typst.app due to a packaging issue.

Local installation

If Typst Universe is online, this template will be downloaded automatically to

$CACHEDIR/typst/packages/preview/scholarly-tauthesis/$VERSION/

when one runs the command

typst init @preview/scholarly-tauthesis:$VERSION mythesis

Here $VERSION should be ≥ 0.9.0. The value $CACHEDIR for your OS can be discovered from https://docs.rs/dirs/latest/dirs/fn.cache_dir.html.

Manual installation

For a manual installation, download the contents of this repository via Git or as a ZIP file from the template tags page, and store them in the folder

$DATADIR/typst/packages/preview/scholarly-tauthesis/$VERSION/

so that a local installation of typst can discover the tauthesis.typ file no matter where you are running it from. To find out the value $DATADIR for your operating system, see https://docs.rs/dirs/latest/dirs/fn.data_dir.html. The value $VERSION is the version A.B.C ≥ 0.9.0 of this template you wish to use.

Initializing a local copy of the project

Once the package has been installed either automatically or manually, the command

typst init @preview/scholarly-tauthesis:$VERSION mythesis

creates a folder mythesis with the template files in place. Simply make the mythesis folder you current working directory and run

typst compile template/main.typ --pdf-standard ua-1

in the shell of your choice to compile the document from scratch. Alternatively, type

typst watch template/main.typ --pdf-standard ua-1

to have a typst process watch the file for changes and compile it when a file is changed.

If all else fails…

… and these installation instructions do not work for some reason, the package file tauthesis.typ can be moved next to the file template/main.typ, and the import statements

#import "@preview/scholarly-tauthesis:$VERSION" as tauthesis

can be changed to

#import "relative/path/to/tauthesis.typ" as tauthesis

in all files that need to import the template package. This includes at least template/main.typ but possibly other content files as well.

On the choice of fonts

As of 2025-04-16 the Typst packaging ecosystem has yet to figure out a best way of distributing template-specific fonts and other binary-format resources that a template might rely on. The packaging system currently relies on a Git repository, which means that it is not practical to include the fonts that Tampere University recommends along with this template.

You should therefore download and install the (static) OpenType (.otf) or TrueType (.ttf) versions of the recommended fonts onto your system, if they are not already installed. If you want to write your thesis on typst.app, it should be enough to upload the required (static versions) of the .ttf or .otf font files into the project there, if they are not already available on the service.

The current font recommendation is as follows:

These are all openly licensed, meaning they should be accessible for all major operating systems. They also support the font features, such as small capital letters and bold text, that are required by this thesis template.

Archiving the final version of your work

Before submitting your thesis to the university archives, it needs to be converted to an accessible PDF format. Typst versions ≥ 0.14.0 should support the creation of PDF/UA-1 files, when run with the command

typst compile --pdf-standard ua-1 template/main.typ

This should work, by itself, if you do not include PDF files as images into your document, or forget to add alternative texts to your images and equations. To include vector graphics, use SVG files instead. See the Typst accessibility guide for details.

Once you are getting ready to submit your thesis, check that it fulfills basic accessibility requirements by running the thesis file through the program veraPDF with the PDF/UA-1 profile. Profile selection should happen automatically, if the file was generated with the correct PDF standard flag of the Typst compiler.

If the program complains that the file template/main.pdf does not conform to the standard, the Muuntaja-service of Tampere University could be used to do the final conversion to a weaker PDF/A standard. See the related instructions (link) for how to do it. Basically it boils down to feeding your compiled PDF document to the converter at https://muuntaja.tuni.fi. Remember to check that the output of the converter is not corrupted, before submitting your thesis to the archives. Also note that the converter might strip tags from your document, making in unaccessible.

In addition to using veraPDF to perform basic PDF/UA-1 conformance checks, you should also have a quick look at the accessibility tags generated by Typst. This can be done on the service showtags provided by the helpful people of The LaTeX Project. On Microsoft Windows®︎, the program PAC is also available. You do not have to go through the entire tag tree, as it is mainly meant for screen reader consumption, but it is a good idea to look up alternative texts of images and equations (Formula elements) and check that they seem sensible.

Once the output of both veraPDF and showtags (or PAC) seems acceptable, you may submit your thesis to Trepo.

Note: if you are unable to produce an accessible version of your thesis according to these PDF accessibility checkers, you should attach the source code of the thesis in a sensible reading order to the Trepo submission! This template shows examples of embedding the source code into the PDF file itself, but note that a separate ZIP archive is the best format for the source code submission. Visually impaired people might not be able to extract the attachments from a PDF file, but a separate ZIP archive can be opened easily on any system.

Usage

Start out by filling in the thesis metadata into the file metadata.typ. Once this is in place, you may start writing the content of your thesis.

Front matter contents are written into the files in the folder frontmatter/. These include the thesis abstracts, preface, glossary and artificial intelliegence disclaimer page contents.

You can either write your entire main matter in the mainmatter/index.typ file, or more preferrably, split it into multiple chapter-specific files, place those in the mainmatter/ folder and include them into the index file, which this template tries to demonstrate. Appendices may be included into the file appendices/index.typ as their own chapters.

Appendices are added into the folder appendices/. They can all be written as separate chapters into the file appendices/index.typ, or included into the index file as the index file currently demonstrates.

You can write your own commands (functions) in the preamble.typ file. This needs to be imported at the start of each chapter you plan to use the commands in.

You should probably not modify the file tauthesis.typ, unless there is a bug that needs fixing right now, and not when the maintainer of this project manages to find the time to do it.

Contributing

Issues may be created in the issue tracker on the template GitLab repository, if one has a GitLab account. Merge requests may also be performed after GitLab account creation, and forking the project. See GitLab’s documentation on this to find out how to do it (link).

License

This project itself uses the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for details.