tarheelbiostatistics/doctoralthesistextemplate

LaTeX Template for Doctoral Theses. NO guarantee that this is up to date with current UNC-CH Graduate School's formatting guidelines.

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doctoralthesistextemplate's Issues

Known Gotchas

• the fontsize for the section titles are set in the layout.tex file is to 12pt, and this is NOT updated by the fontsize setting in the YAML header.

% Section titles
\titleformat{\section}{\normalfont\fontsize{12}{15}\bfseries}{\thesection}{1em}{}

• chapter titles must be ALL CAPS
• use the \mychapter[]{} macro for chapters. If you use the # in a .Rmd, this is converted to a \chapter{} macro, which will not populate the table of contents incorrectly (it put the numbers in front of the chapter entries). Note that the chapter number goes in the brackets.
• the \mychapter[1]{FIRST CHAPTER}\label{firstchapter} macro does not yield the correct references numbers when using \ref{firstchapter}. This can probably be fixed by a LaTeX expert by modifying the command definition in template.tex:

% Use this command to start each chapter
% The format allows chapters in the table 
% of contents to meet grad school requirements
% as of 2017

\newcommand{\mychapter}[2]{
    \setcounter{chapter}{#1}
    \setcounter{section}{0}
    \chapter*{#2}
    \addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{#2}
}

Also, unrelated to the template, but other gotchas:

• Do not include titles such as Professor, Doctor, Dr., PhD, or any identifiers such as “chair” or “advisor” before or after any names.

Ignore more files in the .gitignore

We need to ignore a few types of files that are not useful. The .tex files are useful; the .aux, .log, etc files are not useful because they are generated from the .tex files.

We can ignore not useful files. Ignoring them does two things: (1) they allow the files to persist in our local folders (2) they do not save the files to the git history, which means that they will not clutter up the repo. We ignore the pdf file because we don't want to see it in the history, but we DO want to see it in our local directory.

File extensions to be added to the .gitignore file:

• .log
• .gz
• .dvi
• .aux
• .DSstore

To ignore these, simply add a line to the .gitignore file with *.dvi to ignore all files (*) with the extension .dvi.

@cttnguyen @djluckett could one of you take this on?

1. pull down most recent changes from the remote
2. make the above changes to the .gitignore file
3. make a pull request and describe these changes in the pull request

Remove and ignore .DSstore files

• Remove the three .DSstore files from the repo
• Ignore all of those file extensions (*.DSstore) to prevent this problem in the future

Note to other developers: rticles

The rticles package (https://github.com/rstudio/rticles) may have useful examples.

Next Steps

After #6, I think the basics of the template are now in place. There's still a bit to do (in no particular order):

• update README.md with directions on how to use the template
• test compilation of example_dissertation.Rmd - it would be helpful if others did this
• add an example figure to example_dissertation.Rmd
• review the UNC style guidelines to be sure the template meets the criteria
• add a CONTRIBUTING.md file that includes a description of the directory structure (where and why files are)
• document all the YAML variables

What else?

add Contributing file

We should add a CONTRIBUTING.md file with guidelines for updating and contributing to this document.

Unpack Template 2 into similar format as Template 1

@bcjaeger was kind enough to add his template to this repo. It's in a zipped file, here. I would like it better if this template were unzipped and put in a style more similar to the sub-directory for Template 1.

My estimate is that the difficulty level is:

• git: low/med
• tex: low

@bcjaeger @phoebejiang @djluckett @cttnguyen which of you would like to do this? I can walk you through it.

Use of Byron's template

I found an issue in using Byron's template. His template has multiple "input" frontmatter files (e.g. titlepage.tex). I can't find a way to pass pandoc variables to input .tex files. So we have a few options:

1. Someone can figure how to pass pandoc variables to .tex files read into the main template by \input{}.
2. Not use Rmarkdown (not my preferred choice).
3. Put all of Byron's frontmatter files directly in the main template.tex file.

I vote for 3.

Updates to formatting

A recent grad was asked to make these changes in the template format. I am not sure if they're implented yet, so I'll list them here until we can edit/verify

• Title page
  • The title needs to be in a font size of 10,11, or 12.
  • it needs to keep the 2" top margin
  • the approved by: and names need to meet a 1" right margin.
• Copyright page needs a 2" bottom margin.

Standalone .tex template or R package?

Should we develop this template as a standalone .tex template? Or put it in an rpackage so that it can be called from rmarkdown::draft(), e.g.:
rmarkdown::draft("MyJSSArticle.Rmd", template = "jss_article", package = "rticles")

Roll back history?

Today's commit history is messy. Perhaps we should force-push a cleaned up version? I think we should possibly roll back the master commit to bbf6a9e and try to unpack template 2 (i.e. issue #7 ) again.

@bsaul, what do you think? Do you think it's better to keep today's commits as a learning experience? Or do you think rolling back and trying it again would make things a lot more clear? Thanks for looking at it!

Add links/refs to original tex template

The original tex template was created by Björn B. Brandenburg.

He should also be thanked in #18

add ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md

Add a file that acknowledges and thanks the many people who have contributed to the various templates.