Macquarie University Thesis Quarto Template

This project is our attempt to bring our thesisdownmq package to everyone! Unlike R Markdown and our previous work on thesisdownmq, Quarto doesn’t have a dependency or requirement for R. Quarto was developed to be multilingual, beginning with R, Python, Javascript, and Julia, with the idea that it will work even for languages that don’t yet exist.

Please note that most of the Quarto Project structure we utilised here was inspired by the Monash University Thesis Template of @robjhyndman.

Here is a preview on what the thesis looks like:

Currently, the PDF version is fully-functional (The word, gitbook and epub versions are developmental, have no templates behind them, and are essentially calls to the appropriate functions via Quarto.)

Under the hood, the Reed College template was updated to ensure that documents conform precisely to submission standards at Macquarie University. At the same time, composition and formatting can be done using lightweight markdown syntax, and code from your favourite language and its output can be seamlessly included using rmarkdown.

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

An example of the thesis template can be downloaded from here: https://github.com/thomas-fung/mq-thesis-quarto/blob/main/examples/sample.pdf.

If you are simply looking for a Macquarie University thesis LaTeX template, you should check this out: https://github.com/aalexei/mqthesis.

Installing Quarto

Use the following link to install Quarto:

https://quarto.org/docs/get-started/

Notice that it should come with the more recent versions of RStudio.

Installing the template from Thomas Fung’s GitHub

You can use this as a template to create a report. To do this, use the following command in your Terminal:

quarto use template thomas-fung/mq-thesis-quarto

This will install the extension and download a bunch of qmd files (basically one per chapter) that you can use as a starting place for your thesis.

To compile your thesis into a pdf, use the following command in your terminal

quarto render --to mqthesis-pdf

or if you are an R user, type the following command in your R console

library(quarto)
quarto_render(output_format = "mqthesis-pdf")

Please notice that the file _quarto.yml contains all the reuqired YAML information of the document.

How to cite

@misc{mqthesisquarto2023,
  author = {Fung, Thomas},
  title = {Macquarie University Thesis Quarto Template},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/thomas-fung/mq-thesis-quarto}}
}

NOTE: If you’ve used this template to write your thesis, drop me a line at thomas.fung.dr@gmail.com and I’ll add a link to showcase it!

This template would satisfy the following formating requirement

Presentation and formatting

in A4 pdf format
1.5 spacing
meant to be printed as one-sided
margins of at least 3cm on the left border, at least 1.5cm on the right border and at least 1.5cm on the top and bottom
pages numbered consecutively

Preliminary pages

The preliminary pages will be organised in the following order (some items can be removed):

A title page with:
- the thesis title
- your names and degrees
- your university department
- date of submission/re-submission.
a table of content
a list of tables
a list of figures
an abstract
A signed statement of originality (following this template)
- you will have to add in your own Ethics Committee approval and protocol number (if applicable)
acknowledgement
the written component of the thesis