This project was inspired by the
bookdown package and is an
updated version of my Senior Thesis template in the reedtemplates
package here. It was
originally designed to only work with the Reed College LaTeX template,
but has since been adapted to work with many different institutions by
many different individuals. Check out the Customizing thesisdown to
your
institution
section below for examples.
Currently, the PDF and gitbook versions are fully-functional. The word
and epub versions are developmental, have no templates behind them, and
are essentially calls to the appropriate functions in bookdown.
If you are new to working with bookdown/rmarkdown, please read over
the documentation available in the gitbook template at
https://ismayc.github.io/thesisdown_book.
The current output for the four versions is here:
PDF
(Generating LaTeX file is available
here
with other files in the book
directory.)
Under the hood, the Reed College LaTeX template is used to ensure that
documents conform precisely to submission standards. At the same time,
composition and formatting can be done using lightweight
markdown syntax,
and R code and its output can be seamlessly included using
rmarkdown.
Customizing thesisdown to your institution
In an ideal world, this package would support a variety of different
LaTeX templates from a wide range of institutions and we’d love to get
it there at some point. Until that time, realize that this was designed
to only work with the Reed College LaTeX template but others have
adapted it to work with their institutions. Here are some that have
customized it to fit their needs. It is recommended you review how they
changed the files by comparing their repositories to this one and then
make tweaks to yours as needed. Feel free to file an issue on this repo
if you have questions/troubles.
Have you created a thesisdown template for your institution and would
like to have it included here? Make a PR similar to the commit done to
include
jayhawkdown.
I’ll review it and merge it in. Let’s keep the list going!
Using {thesisdown} has some prerequisites which are described below. To
compile PDF documents using R, you are going to need to have LaTeX
installed. By far the easiest way to install LaTeX on any platform is
with the tinytex R package:
install.packages(c('tinytex', 'rmarkdown'))
tinytex::install_tinytex()
# after restarting RStudio, confirm that you have LaTeX withtinytex:::is_tinytex()
You may need to install a few extra LaTeX packages on your first attempt
to knit as well. Here is one such example of how to do so:
Ensure that you have already installed LaTeX and the fonts described
above, and are using the latest version of
RStudio. You
can use thesisdown without RStudio. For example, you can write the
Rmd files in your favorite text editor
(e.g. Atom,
Notepad++). But RStudio is
probably the easiest tool for writing both R code and text in your
thesis. It also provides a nice way to build your thesis while
editing. We’ll proceed assuming that you have decided to use the
RStudio workflow.
Install the {bookdown} and {thesisdown} packages. Note that
{thesisdown} is not available on CRAN at the moment and that’s why
install.packages("thesisdown") won’t work. Use
remotes::install_github() as shown below instead to install the
package.
if (!require("remotes"))
install.packages("remotes", repos="https://cran.rstudio.org")
remotes::install_github("rstudio/bookdown")
remotes::install_github("ismayc/thesisdown")
Note that you may need to restart RStudio at this point for
the following dialog to show up.
Get started with the {thesisdown} template. There are two options
for doing so.
3a) RECOMMENDED Create a new RStudio project with a {thesisdown}
template.
In RStudio, click on File > New Project > New Directory.
Then select Thesis Project using thesisdown from the dropdown
that will look something like the image below. You’ll see the
graduation cap as the icon on the left for the appropriate project
type.
Next, give your project a name and specify where you’d like the
files to appear. In the screenshot below, the project name is
my_thesis and it will appear as a new folder on my Desktop.
If you got this far, skip over step 3b which is the older version of
getting the template. It might force you to change some of the
directories to get knitting to work and has some other limitations
as well. That’s why step 3a is recommended.
3b) Use the New R Markdown dialog to select Thesis:
Note that this will currently only Knit if you name the
directory index as shown above. This guarantees that index.html
is generated correctly for the Gitbook version of the thesis.
After choosing which type of output you’d like in the YAML at the
top of index.Rmd, Knit the index.Rmd file to get the book in
PDF or HTML formats.
Day-to-day writing of your thesis
You need to edit the individual chapter R Markdown files to write your
thesis. It’s recommended that you version control your thesis using
GitHub if possible. RStudio can also easily sync up with GitHub to make
the process easier. While writing, you should git commit your work
frequently, after every major activity on your thesis. For example,
every few paragraphs or section of text, and after major step of
analysis development. You should git push at the end of each work
session before you leave your computer or change tasks. For a gentle,
novice-friendly guide to getting starting with using Git with R and
RStudio, see https://happygitwithr.com/.
Rendering
To render your thesis into a PDF, open index.Rmd in RStudio and then
click the “knit” button. To change the output formats between PDF,
gitbook and Word, look at the output: field in index.Rmd and
comment-out the formats you don’t want.
The PDF file of your thesis will be deposited in the _book/ directory,
by default.
Components
The following components are ones you should edit to customize your
thesis:
_bookdown.yml
This is the main configuration file for your thesis. You can change the
name of your outputted file here for your thesis and other options about
your thesis here.
index.Rmd
This file contains all the meta information that goes at the beginning
of your document. You’ll need to edit the top portion of this file (the
YAML) to put your name on the first page, the title of your thesis, etc.
Note that you need to have at least one chapter start in the index.Rmd
file for the build to work. For the template, this is done with
# Introduction in the example from the template.
01-chap1.Rmd, 02-chap2.Rmd, etc.
These are the Rmd files for each chapter in your dissertation. Write
your thesis in these. If you’re writing in RStudio, you may find the
wordcount addin useful
for getting word counts and readability statistics in R Markdown
documents.
bib/
Store your bibliography (as bibtex files) here. We recommend using the
citr addin and
Zotero to efficiently manage and insert
citations.
Store your figures and data here and reference them in your R Markdown
files. See the bookdown book for
details on cross-referencing items using R Markdown.
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