How I’m Writing My Dissertation in Quarto

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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.