A $\LaTeX$ user's lament

Dear readers,

IIT Kharagpur doesn't give a $\LaTeX$ template that a Ph.D. candidate can use to write his/her thesis. After toiling for some two-three odd hours, I wrote a workable class file for this purpose and a trickier jacket template. Writing a code to generate the jacket spine was the trickiest part. After many trial and error cycles I finally achieved some success.

Also, I would mention that there were two cases where a $\LaTeX$ template was not provided by the publisher. Please bear in mind that these are reputed publishers. To my astonishment I found that both the submission systems accepted $\LaTeX$ sources. Writing a .bst file to suit the publishers' bibliography style is not an easy task.

I have a request to all the publishers. Please ditch the closed source, Microsoft Word standard. Word documents are a typesetter's nightmare.

Regards.

Edit: The code is now hosted at http://code.google.com/p/iitkgp-lug/