A LaTeX template that conforms to the University of Southern California PhD thesis guidelines with nice default stylistic elements
This template should be a good starting point for a USC PhD thesis. The template should conform to all USC requirements, but since the requirements leave some room for stylistic choices, the template includes a few stylistic elements relating to things like paragraph indentation, line spacing in the front matter, right-hand-side margin overflow etc.
For best results building LaTeX documents, I suggest using latexmk. Once it's installed, build the document with
latexmk -pdf USC-PhD.tex
Using latexmk ensures that all required build sequences are run so that cross-referencing and bibliography entries are up to date.
For intermediate testing, pdflatex USC-PhD.tex will be a bit faster, but if you find that some references are not updating, use latexmk.
To ensure that the nomencalture is rendered correctly, you will need to use makeindex every time nomenclature entries are added, changed or deleted, as follows:
makeindex USC-PhD.nlo -s nomencl.ist -o USC-PhD.nls