For the record: here you can see a single (still unfinished) page of my PhD thesis prepared in LaTeX. I used PhD thesis style prepared by Jamie Stevens and wrote the whole thing using Kile editor. An image on the margin can be inserted with command:
\marginpar{
\centering{
\includegraphics[width=3cm]{image.pdf}
}
Caption text
}
Freelancing science 
Egon Willighagen
June 19, 2008 at 20:39
Yes, LaTeX rules!
Eva
June 20, 2008 at 03:03
Nice! I like the image in the margin. I’m not allowed anything creative like that – stupid university rules about layout. And I never got around to learning LaTeX. Some day, but not for my thesis. It was easier to use Word with existing templates to make sure I got all the layout requirements.
Zsolt Zsoldos
June 20, 2008 at 12:25
Good choice! I wrote mine in LaTeX too (back in 1995), it was unusual in the chemstry department, but in the Math and Computer Science departments it is pretty much the standard.
ZZ
kevin
June 25, 2008 at 13:38
neat!
I tried to do that for mine but in the end i had to use word as that’s the accepted e-format for my dept and my supp din’t quite understand why i dun wanna use word’s view edits functions….
sigh…
Pawel Szczesny
July 6, 2008 at 16:13
I am fortunate to have no requirements concerning layout of PhD thesis. Zsolt, I agree that in Math/CS deps it’s a standard, but on Biology when I did my masters degree I guess I was the only one with work in LaTeX.
BTW, my favourite layout has the PhD thesis of Ben Fry – but that’s completely another field (he wrote about visualization).
Niels
August 26, 2009 at 21:23
Interesting, I notice that there’s no gray background in the page number box.. I have the same problem.