amsterdown is an RMarkdown PhD thesis template for the University of
Amsterdam. It’s based on my PhD
thesis that I wrote with the
bookdown package.
(R)Markdown enables you to write a reproducible PhD thesis using the
lightweight and plain-text
Markdown formatting. It
forms a great notebook
style workflow to
integrate all your text, code, figures, and other output that together
make up your PhD thesis work. Finally, bookdown allows you to easily
create an html-version of your thesis that you can host online, and to
harness the power of LaTeX to make a beautifully formatted PDF for
printing your thesis.
This template is an easy way to get started, by:
- Providing a common and complete structure for the thesis, including appendices, acknowledgments, etc.
- Removing the need to write any LaTeX commands yourself (or at least, prolonging it as long as possible).
- Making sure you adhere to the University of Amsterdam thesis requirements.
amsterdown is not (yet) available on CRAN, so install it from
GitHub with:
if(!require(devtools)) install.packages("devtools") # devtools package allows installation of packages from github
devtools::install_github("lcreteig/amsterdown") # install amsterdown from githubIf you just want a peek at the template without installing it as an R package, check out the folder with all the files here on Github.
Alternatively, to try out using the template without having to install
anything locally, click this button to launch an RStudio session with
everything you need pre-installed:
If you’ve installed the package and are using
RStudio, simply navigate to “File” > “New File”
> “R Markdown…” > “From Template” > “UvA thesis {amsterdown}”. Use
index for the new directory name (feel free to change this after), so
that the main file will be called index.Rmd, then hit OK.
Then, create a new RStudio project by going to “File” > “New Project…”
> “Existing Directory”, then “Browse…” to the directory you just
created (index, or whatever you named it to), and finally hit “Create
Project”.
Click “Build Book” from the Build pane to render the thesis to an output format of your choosing.
Or, (e.g., if you’re not using the RStudio IDE), run the following lines of R code to render the template:
rmarkdown::draft('index.Rmd', # create new draft based off template
template = 'thesis', package = 'amsterdown',
create_dir = TRUE, edit = FALSE)
setwd("index") # navigate to new directory
# render the thesis template to all output formats
bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", output_format = "all")
# or
#bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", output_format = 'bookdown::gitbook') # to render to html
#bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", output_format = 'bookdown::pdf_book') # to render to PDFSee the package documentation for more detailed instructions and further information.
The template supports html and pdf outputs. To inspect the outputs
as produced by the latest version of the template, see here:
html,
pdf
(A4),
pdf
(book)
If you’re using RStudio, all you should have to
do is install the amsterdown package (the bookdown package will be
installed along with it). You’ll also need a
LaTeX distribution to be able to
create the pdf outputs. If you don’t have one yet, I’d recommend
TinyTeX.
If you don’t have RStudio installed, you’ll also need to install pandoc if you don’t have it already (in addition to a LaTex distribution).
This project was inspired by other RMarkdown PhD thesis templates that
use bookdown, notably:
- Chester Ismay’s thesisdown for Reed College
- Ben Marwick’s huskydown for the University of Washington
- Ulrik Lyng’s oxforddown for Oxford University
| User 🤓 | University 🏫 | Link 🔗 |
|---|---|---|
| noorseijdel | University of Amsterdam | noorseijdel.github.io/thesis |
| LDSamson | University of Groningen | ldsamson.github.io/Thesis/ |
| lukassnoek | University of Amsterdam | lukassnoek/thesis |
| BenGoudsmit | University of Leiden | BenGoudsmit/Thesis |
| Leo4Luffy | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona | Leo4Luffy/Repo_TFM |
| lynnsoerensen | University of Amsterdam | UvA-DARE |