thesisdown

This project was inspired by the bookdown package and is an updated version of my Senior Thesis template in the reedtemplates package here.

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.

The current output for the four versions is here:

• PDF (Generating LaTeX file is available here with other files at in the book directory.)
• Word
• ePub
• gitbook

Under the hood, the Reed College LaTeX template (and soon the Reed College Word 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.

Using thesisdown has some prerequisites which are described below. To compile PDF documents using R, you are going to need to have LaTeX installed. It can be downloaded for Windows at http://http://miktex.org/download and for Mac at http://tug.org/mactex/mactex-download.html. Follow the instructions to install the necessary packages after downloading the (somewhat large) installer files. You may need to install a few extra LaTeX packages on your first attempt to knit as well.

Using thesisdown from Chester's GitHub

To use thesisdown from RStudio:

1. Install the latest RStudio.

2. Install the bookdown and thesisdown packages:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("rstudio/bookdown")
devtools::install_github("ismayc/thesisdown")

3. 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.