How I’m Writing My Dissertation in Quarto | Carl Colglazier – Carl Colglazier

Author

Carl Colglazier

Published

March 24, 2025

I use Quarto for most of my academic and personal writing. It is flexible, well-documented, and supported by open source and some great developers at Posit.

A lot goes into a dissertation and famously the documents themselves don’t tend to get a lot of attention.

Northwestern Thesis Format

The Graduate School at Northwestern has detailed formatting criteria they require for dissertations, yet no official LaTeX template.

I created a template as an extension that provides:

A LaTeX template compliant with the TGS formatting requirements
An experimental Typst template. Note that this probably is not useful yet for an entire dissertation because Quarto does not support book-like structures for Typst documents.

---
title: How I'm Writing My Dissertation in Quarto
date: 2025-03-24
---

I use [Quarto](https://quarto.org/) for most of my academic and personal writing. It is flexible, well-documented, and supported by open source and some great developers at Posit.

A lot goes into a dissertation and famously the documents themselves don't tend to get a lot of attention.

## Northwestern Thesis Format

The Graduate School at Northwestern has [detailed formatting criteria](https://www.tgs.northwestern.edu/academic-policies-procedures/dissertation-publication/dissertation-formatting-requirements/) they require for dissertations, yet no official LaTeX template.

I created a [template](https://github.com/CarlColglazier/northwestern-thesis-quarto) as an extension that provides:

+ A LaTeX template compliant with the TGS formatting requirements

+ An experimental Typst template. Note that this probably is not useful yet for an entire dissertation because Quarto does not support book-like structures for Typst documents.