I’m formatting a thesis at the moment and I’ve decided to use Classic Thesis as a starting point. From what I’ve read this is a choice that will divide the room. Some people seem to love the look and others hate it. I quite like the look of it, I certainly couldn’t do better myself, at least not at the moment. It also catches a lot of flak for the way the latex is written. I can’t see anything particularly wrong but this is also my first non-trivial document so what do I know. Anyway, I’ve hit the odd snag along the way so I thought I’d document them for anyone following the same path as me.
The first thing I did was change the names of many of the files. Out goes the name ClassicThesis.tex in comes thesis.tex (although I believe there’s a convention to call this main.tex). I’ve also moves the .bib files to their own folder, changed the name of the gfx folder to images separated front and back matter into their own folders called, wait for it, front and back. I changed the name of the configuration file to config.tex. I deleted almost all the files I don’t need. I left the license in to stay GPL compliant. I’m sure I made a few other tweaks, nothing that couldn’t really be fixed with search and replace though.
Changing the language of the babel package tripped me up for a moment. In config.tex it suggests you should change the setting to the language of your document. I entered british and went to recompile only to be met with a crash. The error message was Contents.tex: error: 6: TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [input stack size=10000]. …bookmark[1]{\contentsname}{tableofcontents}. Just like all good errors it doesn’t point at the problem. After some poking around I found in thesis.tex just below \begin{document} there is \selectlanguage{ngerman}. Changing that to british fixed the problem.