I have been working on a new LaTeX class file for University of Michigan dissertations for awhile now. I finally got tired of the limitations of umdiss.cls. The main goals (which I believe I have achieved) of the new class file are:

1. load the book class and modify only what’s necessary
2. be compatible with as many packages as possible
3. require the hyperref package, because it does many very handy things, like automatically creating pdf bookmarks and links from the table of contents, list of figures etc.
4. work with includeonly (umdiss.cls does not)
5. follow formatting guidelines of the University of Michigan

I know of one feature which is not implemented fully yet, and that is the abstract. If you use the abstract environment, it will typeset your abstract according to the guidelines set for dissertation abstracts by Rackham, but there is not an option yet to have it formatted for actual inclusion in the dissertation, including being listed in the table of contents. This will come soon.

You can either download the zip file, browse the directory, or view the latest version in the svn repository. I have included an extensively commented example, which includes several macros that I use to make things easier. There are also quite a few comments in the .cls file as well. A more thorough documentation will come later.

I hope you find the class file handy, and please let me know if you find any errors.

Now back to writing the actual content of the dissertation…