Templates

The Thesis & Dissertation Support Center maintains templates for Microsoft Word and LaTeX in an effort to make adhering to the Graduate Editorial Office Publication Standards a little easier.

Thesis and Dissertation formatting requirements are the same for all students. Guidelines and requirements are available in the Editorial Office’s GRADUATE SCHOOL FORMATTING GUIDE.

Keep in mind that your document must meet accessibility standards. You can find some great resources on how to make your document accessible here: Accessibility in your Document.

These guides have been updated as of 4/17/2026. Older templates may be used through the Summer 2026 semester.

MS Word

T&D MS Word Template- Arial

The standard template that most students should use. This document uses custom Word “styles” to help format your document to meet Editorial Office Guidelines.

A few people prefer to use Times New Roman (Note: while Times New Roman is a very good font in the hard copy version, Arial is a superior font for readability on a computer screen) Please use this version if you are going to use Times New Roman.

LaTeX

A LaTex editor should be used when comping either version of the LaTex template. Our office highly suggests the use of Overleaf as UF provides a free account to its users. Version updated as of Spring 2026. Due to new accessibility requirements, you must use LuaLaTex and Texlive 2025 in your compiler.

T&D LaTex Template

Because of the nature of the Editorial Office’s requirements, we have had to adapt by using many modified environments that shows log errors. This is normal as long as it does not cause a compiling error. Please reach out for assistance if you have any questions.

Accessibility in your Document

To meet UF accessibility requirements, both the LaTeX and Word documents have been updated. Please use the following resources to ensure your document meets accessibility requirements.

Making your Microsoft Word document Accessible

Making your LaTeX document Accessible

To ensure that your LaTeX document will be accessible you must use the provided template and run your compiler with LuaLaTeX and TeXlive 2025. For best results the Thesis and Dissertation Formatting office recommends using Overleaf. The following resources can help you with accessibility in LaTeX:

What Works

As of the current TeXLive release (Dec 2025) and Overleaf using LuaLaTeX 2025:

Basic DOM (Document Object Model) structure -- Headings hierarchy, paragraphs etc.
Math using MathML (with certain caveats)
Image alt text
Tables with header rows/columns (with some configuration)
Graphing/diagrams with alt text (using TikZ)
Lists and block structures

What We Know Does Not and Caveats

The following comes from our own testing and reports of others. It is very likely incomplete.

The functionality used for accessibility for much of this work is dependent on the PDF 2.0 specification, which has hit or miss adoption, with some features not even present in Adobe Reader. This is especially true of the MathML support
- Right now the best supported setup is using Adobe Reader 2025 with NVDA on Windows, and support for all features is unverified
Figure captions create problematic tag structures
Numbered equations also create problematic tag structures
Table headers have to be declared prior to and external to a table, as LaTeX has no native table header element
Page headers and footers are not included within readable elements and the reading order. If these are used for page numbers, this can present a problem if referred to in text (e.g. "... using the data from page 4..."), or if used as part of an internal citation/reference
Document metadata, such as Title, does not populate properly into PDF metadata