Let's make it work

Release Summary: v7.5.0 → v7.10.1

This release marks a significant milestone in expanding institutional support and internationalization, alongside a major refactoring of core systems for improved stability and flexibility.

Key Highlights

• New Institutional Support:
  • Full support for IPL/ISEL (Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa), including custom styles, cover layouts, and integrity statements.
  • Expanded ULisboa support: IST (Técnico), FCUL (Sciences), ISEG (Economics & Management), and FMV (Veterinary Medicine).
  • Enhanced NOVA FCT covers and automated integrity statements for NOVA FCSH.
• Internationalization:
  • Added full support for Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) with optimized CJK font loading.
  • Expanded European language support (Danish, Catalan, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Dutch, and more).
• AI Transparency: Introduced the aidisclose2 package, allowing for formal AI usage declarations in theses using a modernized taxonomy.
• Sustainability: Added full support for Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) icons (English and Portuguese) with mono/inverted style options.
• Engine Improvements:
  • Geometry: Transitioned page layout handling to the geometry package for better industry compatibility.
  • Auto-Fonts: Implementation of automatic font downloading for LuaLaTeX users.

Refactoring & Fixes

• Reliability: Initiated the migration of internal data storage (departments, settings) to a new memstore package.
• Standardization: Overhauled date handling using \PrintDateISO across all institutional templates.
• Accessibility: Improved screen-reader compatibility and PDF language tagging.
• Glossaries: Enhanced layout customization for symbols and glossary lists.

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Full Changelog: v7.5.0...v7.10.0

v7.5.0 - Quality‑of‑life

novathesis 7.5.0 — Release notes

Release date: 2025-11-09
Compared to: 7.4.1

Overview

Version 7.5.0 is a minor release focused on quality‑of‑life improvements, new customization options, documentation updates, and several bug fixes. No major breaking API changes are expected for standard users moving from 7.4.1, but please review the Upgrade notes if you have local overrides or engine-specific workflows.

Highlights

• New compact layout option to reduce vertical spacing in lists, captions and paragraphs.
• New font‑loading helper macros for easier XeLaTeX / LuaLaTeX setup and better Unicode handling.
• Improved caption and float spacing/consistency (including better behavior in minipages and two‑column contexts).
• Smarter defaults for PDF metadata, bookmarks and language accessibility.
• Bug fixes for appendix numbering, footnotes-in-captions, and glossary/index ordering.
• Documentation and migration guide updated with examples for 7.4.1 → 7.5.0.

What’s included

• Added
  • compact class option: enable compact for tighter vertical spacing.
  • Extended font‑loading helper macros for XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX.
• Changed
  • More consistent caption/float behavior and spacing.
  • Improved defaults for hyperref metadata and PDF accessibility.
  • TOC handling now respects tocdepth across frontmatter and appendices.
• Fixed
  • Appendix numbering regression with appendix helpers and custom labels.
  • Footnotes inside captions that broke layout in some engines.
  • Ordering issues in glossary/index generation on certain LaTeX engines.
• Documentation
  • Updated user manual and migration guide with compact examples and suggested font setups.

Upgrade notes

• Do a clean build after upgrading (remove auxiliary files) and regenerate bibliography/index files:
  • latexmk -C
  • latexmk -pdf (or your normal build flow)
  • If you use biber: run biber; if you use bibtex: run bibtex — verify your bibliography backend.
• If you maintain local .sty or template overrides, scan them for internal macro names; a small number of helper macro names were clarified and may require minor adjustments.
• The compact option is opt‑in — leave it off if you rely on exact spacing from 7.4.1.

Compatibility

• Backwards compatible for typical usage migrating from 7.4.1.
• No mandatory external package updates required, but updating your TeX distribution (TeX Live / MiKTeX) to a recent release is recommended.

Changelog summary

• Added: compact layout option; font‑loading helper macros
• Improved: caption and TOC handling; PDF metadata
• Fixed: appendix numbering, footnotes‑in‑captions, glossary/index order
• Docs: updated manual and migration guide

Notes

This release adds documentation and changelog entries only (no code API breaking changes expected). See RELEASE_NOTES_7.5.0.md and CHANGELOG.md in the repo for the full release notes and migration guidance.

Credits

Thanks to the community contributors who reported issues and provided patches.

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v7.4.2 — It's getting better

Fixed the Glossaries PDF bookmark (menu on the side).

novathesis revamped

What's Changed

• NEW STRUCTURE — in the past, all user files were in folder Chapters, which could get quite populated and messy. The new file structures includes:
  • 0-Config — Configuration files
  • 1-FrontMatter — all the files/contents for the initial (usually numerated in roman) pages
  • 2-MainMatter — the thesis chapters
  • 3-BackMatter — Appendices and Annexes
  • 4-Bibliography — the bibliography files
  • 5-Figures — the figures to be used in the chapters and/or appendices and/or annexes.
  • NOVAthesisFiles — where the magic happens… do not touch the contents of this folder!
• [NEW SCHOOL] Faculdade de Ciências - Universidade do Porto by @sgtpepperpt in #544
• Fixed minor language stuff
• Profiling is not active by default anymore
• Replaces keyword separator from comma to a small dot
• Chnaged citation to be local to the template to the copyright notice
• In nbibliography, print links by this preference order: DOI-eprint-URL.
• In nbibliography, print links by this preference order: DOI-eprint-URL.
• Support for Ukrainian

New Contributors

• @sgtpepperpt made their first contribution in #544

Full Changelog: v7.3.3...v7.4.1

Welcome 2025

• Added support for partnership in NOVA/FCSH
• Support for NOVA's MASTER IN COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY & BIOINFORMATICS

Yet another small step

This version includes:

• Full unit testing: 300 variants of the template were successful generated. Just for the record, the template supports: 7 different universities with 26 schools overall, 33 MSc degrees and 25 PhD degrees, all of them in multiple languages (tested PT and EN). All variants were compiled with LuaLaTeX and XeLaTeX, and also with PdfLaTeX when possible (some schools/degrees requires customized fonts, which does not work PdfLaTeX).
• SUpport for ISEG from Universidade de Lisboa.
• Updated the support for multiple MSc degrees at NOVA-IMS from Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.
• Updated list of degree names for NOVA-FCT from Universidade NOVA de Lisboa.
• Glossary references are not colorized by default, but that can be changed with option 'color/gls'.**
• Multiple bug fixes.

NOVA FCT 2024

This new release includes the new logo from NOVA FCT (as of 2024).

IST covers

BETTER:

• Fixed covers for final version for ULISBOA/IST.
• Updated nova/ensp to new visual and with support for more than one school logo.
• Fixed rotated pages.
• Fixed book spine.

INTERNALS:

• Relocated nova-nms logo.
• Fixed bug in options2.sty.

Non-standard page sizes

This release fixes the environment newpdflayout that allows to change to non-standard page sizes within the document.

In sync with Overleaf

Improvements

• Fixed some minor bugs;
• Reduced considerably (almost to half) the size of the distribution.