wjakethompson / jayhawkdown

R Markdown template for theses and dissertations at the University of Kansas

jayhawkdown

This package provides a template for writing theses and dissertations at the University of Kansas using rmarkdown and bookdown. Much of this was inspired by the thesisdown package by Chester Ismay.

The original LaTeX template and class document were written by Paul Johnson, and modified for use with pandoc and R markdown.

Installation

You can install jayhawkdown from github with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("wjakethompson/jayhawkdown")

You also need a working LaTeX program:

• Macintosh: MacTeX
• Linux: TeXLive
• Windows: TeXLive

Example Usage

The recommended way to use this template is with RStudio; however, it is possible to use this template with a different IDE.

RStudio Usage

1. Open a new RStudio window.

2. Open a new R Markdown document.

   

3. Select from templates, the University of Kansas Thesis template from the jayhawkdown package.

   

4. Because there are multiple files for this template, you must create a directory to house them, and choose a location for the directory. I suggest calling this directory index (you can change this later, but this will make your main R Markdown document be called index.rmd).

5. Select “OK”, and the template should open automatically. Press the “Knit” button at the top of the editor to render the template, and read the document for instructions on how to edit the template for your specific paper.

   

6. If the PDF does not open automatically, you will be able to find it in the newly created _book/ directory.

Other Usage

If you are not using RStudio, you can create a new R Markdown from the jayhawkdown template by using rmarkdown::draft().

1. Open R in your preferred IDE.

2. Open the jayhawkdown template using rmarkdown::draft(). This will create a directory called index/ (or whatever you name the R Markdown document) in your current working directory.

   rmarkdown::draft("index.rmd", template = "kansas", package = "jayhawkdown",
     create_dir = TRUE)

3. When the template opens, you can render the document using bookdown::render_book().

   setwd("index/")
   bookdown::render_book("index.rmd", "jayhawkdown::thesis_pdf")

4. If the PDF does not open automatically, you will be able to find it in the newly created _book/ directory.

Troubleshooting

If the example PDF fails to render, try these steps:

• If you are not using RStudio, attempt to render in RStudio.
• Make sure your LaTeX environment was successfully setup.
• Make sure your R packages are up to date, specifically rmarkdown, bookdown, jayhawkdown, and knitr.

If errors persist after trying all of these steps, post your process along with the resulting error to a new issue on Github, and I will try to help.

jayhawkdown's Issues

pdflatex not found outside of RStudio

Example document knits to PDF just fine using the "Knit" button in RStudio, but when trying to knit outside of RStudio (i.e., bookdown::render_book("index.rmd", "jayhawkdown::thesis_pdf")), getting an error:

/bin/sh: pdflatex: command not found

However, pdflatex is definitely present:

$ which pdflatex
/Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex

$ echo $PATH
//anaconda/bin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/bin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/local/git/bin:/Library/TeX/texbin