Last year I wrote about Daniel Gomez’s post on writing a PhD thesis with Org-mode. Gomez’s post was an excellent exposition of the workflow that he used to write his thesis using Org. One of the most useful features was how he handled his “research chapters,” which had already been submitted to journals for publication. The journals, of course, had their own formatting requirements and some content in the journal article was not appropriate for the thesis (and vice versa).
Gomez put together a framework to handle all these—and other—issues that he described in his post. He did not, however, include the framework itself, although he did say he was considering making a repository for it. Happily, he has done just that and made it available on GitHub.
Formatting content for a Thesis suffers from the same problems that formatting it for a journal does: every school—indeed, every department—has its own rules and standards rigidly enforced by a little old lady in the graduate school who can hold up acceptance of your thesis until those standards are satisfied. It is, therefore, impossible to provide a single framework that will work for everyone, everywhere but you can take a framework such as Gomez’s and tweak it to work for your situation. Mostly that’s going to involve choosing the proper LaTeX class for your thesis. Gomez uses the mimosis class but says everything will probably work with other classes.
If you’re getting ready to write your thesis and would like to do it in Org-mode, be sure to take a look at Gomez’s original post and the framework itself. Even if you don’t use it, there are plenty of good ideas to make the mechanics of the writing easier.