In grad school the last thing I wanted was to waste time on typesetting — yet a thesis is exactly the kind of document with the most formatting rules: the cover page, abstract pages, acknowledgements, and acronym list each have their own conventions, chapter titles must be numbered Chapter N, references must follow IEEE style… Maintaining all of that by hand in a Word template is error-prone and, frankly, inelegant.
Modern WKU Thesis is the graduate thesis template I built for exactly this problem, targeting the College of Science, Mathematics and Technology (CSMT) at Wenzhou-Kean University (WKU). It ships in both Typst and LaTeX.
Features
- Matches the WKU CSMT graduate thesis format spec: fonts, spacing, headers and footers configured once, applied globally
- Cover, Chinese & English abstracts, acknowledgements, and acronym list all auto-generated — just fill in the parameters
- IEEE reference style, plugs straight into
refs.bib - Heading numbering follows the school’s rules: chapters as
Chapter N, sectionsN.M, appendix entriesA., lists use• - Chapters start on a new page automatically; figure and table captions share a unified style
Usage
The Typst version is published on the official package registry. On the web app, click “Start from template” on the dashboard and search for modern-wku-thesis; on the command line it’s a single line:
typst init @preview/modern-wku-thesisThe template exports a graduate-thesis function where all metadata is passed as named arguments:
#import "@preview/modern-wku-thesis:0.1.3": graduate-thesis
#show: graduate-thesis.with(
title: [This is your thesis title],
author: "Timmycheng",
supervisor: [Dr. Jhon Doe],
keywords: [some, key, words],
bibliography: bibliography("refs.bib"),
acronyms: ("AKA": "As Known As"),
)
= Introduction
Your thesis content goes here...The LaTeX Version
For classmates whose machines only have a TeX distribution installed, the repo also carries a LaTeX port with matching styling (latex/). It’s not published to the Typst package registry — grab it from the Releases page, or clone the repo and:
cd latex
latexmk -pdf main.texEngineering Notes
The part I find most interesting is the release pipeline design: during local development, template/main.typ imports ../src/lib.typ via a relative path, so you can edit the source and get hot-reloaded previews; the official release, meanwhile, is built by a CI workflow that rewrites this import into a @preview/modern-wku-thesis:x.y.z package reference before tagging and uploading. Development experience and installation experience never step on each other.
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