lfpdroubi / ufscdown

An updated R Markdown thesis template using the bookdown package

ufscdown

This project was inspired by the thesisdown package. De facto, ufscdown (as well as thesisdown) is only a customization of the bookdown package. ufscdown customizes bookdown to the UFSC format. Check out this link for other 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://thesisdown.netlify.com/. This is also available below 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 at in the book directory.)
• Word
• ePub
• gitbook

Under the hood, the UFSC 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.

Using ufscdown

Using ufscdown 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 with 
tinytex:::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:

tinytex::tlmgr_install("babel-portuges")

To use ufscdown from RStudio:

1. Ensure that you have already installed LaTeX and the fonts described above, and are using the latest version of RStudio. You can use ufscdown without RStudio. For example, you can write the Rmd files in your favourite 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.

2. Install the bookdown and ufscdown packages. Note that ufscdown is not available on CRAN at the moment and that's why install.packages("ufscdown") won't work. Use remotes::install_github() as shown below instead to install the package.

if (!require("remotes")) 
  install.packages("remotes", repos = "http://cran.rstudio.org")
remotes::install_github("lfpdroubi/ufscdown")
# or, if you wish, install all the suggested packages:
remotes::install_github("lfpdroubi/ufscdown", 
                        dependencies = TRUE)

Note that you may need to restart RStudio at this point for the following dialog to show up.

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. This guarantees that index.html is generated correctly for the Gitbook version of the thesis.

4. 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 http://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. It determines what Rmd files are included in the output, and in what order. Arrange the order of your chapters in this file and ensure that the names match the names in your folders.

index.Rmd

This file contains all the meta information that goes at the beginning of your document. You'll need to edit this to put your name on the first page, the title of your thesis, etc.

lista_siglas.tex and lista_simbolos.tex

These are the only .tex files to be edited in latex format.

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.

setup/

Stores the file ufscthesisA4-alf.sty, that customizes abntex to the UFSC format.

figure/ and data/

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.