4. Overall structure of the document

It is good style to start your document with one or more comment lines (beginning with the “%” comment character) that identify what the document is and who wrote it.

Here is the overall structure of your .tex input file:

% opening comments: who, what, when
%   ...
%
\documentclass[12pt]{report}
\usepackage{nmtthesis2009}
  preamble declarations
\begin{document}
  document body
\end{document}

The \documentclass line must be the first non-comment line of any LaTeX file. The “12pt” option selects the required 12-point type. The document class is report.
The second line declares that you are using the NMT thesis template, the 2009 version. You must have a copy of the style file, nmtthesis2009.sty, in the same directory as your document. Click on this link to download a copy of the file.
The preamble is the part of your file between the \documentclass line and the \begin{document} line. These lines set up the overall structure of the document. See Section 5, “Declarations in the preamble”.
The document body is the portion between \begin{document} and \end{document}. This is the actual content of your thesis. See Section 7, “Organizing the body of your document”.

Writing a New Mexico Tech thesis with LaTeX

4. Overall structure of the document