• Requirements
• Video tutorials
• How to use
  • Writing your thesis
  • Building your entire thesis
    • PDF output
    • Gitbook output
    • BS4 book output
    • Word output
  • Building a single chapter
  • Cleaning up generated auxiliary files
• Customisations and extensions
• Limitations
  • Gotchas
  • Output formats

A template for writing an Oxford University thesis in R Markdown. The template uses the bookdown R package together with the OxThesis LaTeX template, plus lots of inspiration from thesisdown.

• Sample PDF output: docs/_main.pdf
• Sample BS4 book output: siobhon-egan.github.io/oxforddown-murdoch/

@misc{eganOxforddown2021,
  author = {Egan, Siobhon},
  title = {Murdoch flabour of oxforddown: Thesis Template for R Markdown},
  year = {2021},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/siobhon-egan/oxforddown-murdoch}},
}

@misc{lyngsOxforddown2019,
  author = {Lyngs, Ulrik},
  title = {oxforddown: An Oxford University Thesis Template for R Markdown},
  year = {2019},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/ulyngs/oxforddown}},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.3484682},
}

The following instructions are from ulyngs/oxforddown

NOTE: as per v2.0, the introduction chapter no longer needs to be named _introduction.Rmd! Apart from this, the videos should still be mostly right!

See the video tutorials for how to use the template:

• Part 1: Building the entire thesis
• Part 2: Building a single chapter
• Part 3: Understanding the file structure
• Part 4: A walk-through example of creating your thesis
• Part 5: The content included in index.Rmd (or: why the introduction chapter is special)
• Part 6: Adjusting the order of chapters
• Part 7: _bookdown.yml: Adjusting build settings
• Part 8: Makefile: Adjusting build settings
• Part 9: The LaTeX templates

For how to write your content with the R Markdown syntax, read through the sample content.

• LaTeX

  • Option 1 (recommended):
    • Mac: download and install MacTeX from tug.org/mactex/ (~4 gigs)
    • Windows: download and install MikTex from miktex.org
  • Option 2 (not recommended):
    • install TinyTeX, a minimal LaTeX installation intended for use with R Markdown.
    • manually install the LaTeX package 'cbfonts-fd' by running tinytex::tlmgr_install('cbfonts-fd') in an R console - TinyTeX will automatically install other necessary LaTeX packages for you when you build to PDF for the first time
    • the reason I do not recommend this option is because several oxforddown users (#11) (including myself) have found that some necessary packages (e.g. for writing Greek symbols) are not installed by TinyTeX for reasons that are not clear

• R and RStudio version 1.2 or higher

• The R packages rmarkdown, bookdown, tidyverse, kableExtra, and here

• If on Mac

  • Command line developer tools. You can install these by typing xcode-select --install in a terminal prompt

• If on Windows

  • The 'Build all' button is set up to use a program called make to build the pdf output and automatically clean up all the weird files LaTeX generates in the process.
  • make can be tricky to install on Windows, so the route of least pain on Windows is to instead build the thesis by knitting index.Rmd or running bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", output_format = "bookdown::pdf_book") in the R console (the only drawback is that this does not clean up many of the files generated by LaTeX when building the thesis).

  If you still want to use 'make', here's how:
  Option 1 (quite painful):

  • (i) download the minGW installer from https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/,
  • (ii) open the MinGW Installation Manager, check the box next to mingw32-base and select 'Mark for installation'
  • (iii) click 'Installation' then 'Apply changes'
  • (iv) make a copy of the file 'mingw32-make.exe' which you will probably find in the folder C:\MinGW\bin\, and name it make.exe
  • (v) include this in your environment variables, by opening a terminal / command prompt and typing set PATH=C:\MinGW\bin;%PATH%

  Option 2 (supposedly less painful):

  • (i) install the package manager chocolatey from here
  • (ii) open a command prompt and type choco install make

• download the ulyngs/oxforddown repo as a zip
• open oxforddown.Rproj in RStudio

• update the YAML header (the stuff at the top between '---') in index.Rmd with your name, college, etc.
• write the individual chapters as .Rmd files in the root folder
• write the front matter (abstract, acknowledgements, abbreviations) and back matter (appendices) by adjusting the .Rmd files in the front-and-back-matter/ folder
• for abbreviations, change front-and-back-matter/abbreviations.tex to fit your needs (follow the LaTeX syntax in there)

.Rmd files you don't want included in the body text must be given file names that begin with an underscore (e.g. front-and-back-matter/_abstract.Rmd and front-and-back-matter/_acknowledgements.Rmd). (Alternatively, specify manually in _bookdown.yml which files should be merged into the body text.)

• options
  • using make: type 'make pdf' in the terminal (not the R console!) or click 'Build All' on the 'Build' tab
  • knit the index.Rmd file or
  • run bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", output_format = "bookdown::pdf_book") in the R console
• the compiled PDF is saved as docs/_main.pdf

• options
  • in the terminal tab (not the R console!), type make gitbook or
  • run bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", output_format = "bookdown::gitbook") in the R console
• the set of HTML files for the gitbook are stored in the docs/ folder, and the front page (docs/index.html) is opened in a browser
• (Note that if you want to deploy your thesis as a gitbook on GitHub Pages, there must be a .nojekyll file in the docs/ folder, otherwise GitHub does some voodoo that causes some filepaths not to work - this file is automatically generated by oxforddown when you build to gitbook)

• for this to work, you must install (1) the latest development version of bookdown (remotes::install_github('rstudio/bookdown')), (2) the downlit package (install.packages("downlit")), (3) the bslib package (not on CRAN yet; install with remotes::install_github("rstudio/bslib"))
• options
  • in the terminal tab, type make bs4book or
  • run bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", output_format = "bookdown::gitbook") in the R console
• the set of HTML files are stored in the docs/ folder, and (for option 1) the front page (docs/index.html) is opened in a browser

• options
  • in the terminal tab, type 'make word'
  • run bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", output_format = "bookdown::word_document2") in the R console
• the compiled MS Word document is saved as docs/_main.docx

The Word output has no templates behind it, and many things do not work (e.g. image rotation, highlighting corrections). I encourage pull requests that optimise the Word output, e.g. by using tools from the officer package.

To knit an individual chapter without compiling the entire thesis:

1. open the .Rmd file of a chapter
2. add a YAML header specifying the output format(s) (e.g. bookdown::word_document2 for a word document you might want to upload to Google Docs for feedback from collaborators)
3. Click the knit button (the output file is then saved in the root folder)

As shown in the sample chapters' YAML headers, to output a single chapter to PDF, use:

output:
  bookdown::pdf_document2:
    template: templates/brief_template.tex
    citation_package: biblatex
documentclass: book
bibliography: references.bib

brief_template.tex formats the chapter in the OxThesis style but without including the front matter (table of contents, abstract, etc).

(Also, if you do not set the option citation_package: biblatex, which tell R Markdown to use BibLaTeX, you will get the error "! LaTeX Error: Environment CSLReferences undefined.")

When you build to PDF via make, the auxillary files will be automatically be removed (to adjust how this is done, edit Makefile).
To clean them up manually, run file.remove(list.files(pattern = "*.(log|mtc|maf|aux|bcf|lof|lot|out|toc)"), here::here("front-and-back-matter", "abbreviations.aux")) in the R console.

To clean up files generated when knitting individual chapters, type 'make clean-knits' in the terminal. Or, if you're on Windows without make available, run the command file.remove(list.files(pattern = "*.(log|mtc|maf|aux|bcf|lof|lot|out|toc)"), here::here("front-and-back-matter", "abbreviations.aux")).

• for some of the common things you might want to do in your thesis, read through the sample content
• for example, the newly added 'Customisations and extensions' chapter (thanks @bmvandoren!) adds tips on how to include PDF pages from a published typeset article in your thesis, and more!

• don't use underscores (_) in your YAML front matter or code chunk labels! (underscores have special meaning in LaTeX, so therefore you are likely to get an error, cf. https://yihui.org/en/2018/03/space-pain/)
  • bad YAML: bibliography: bib_final.bib
  • good YAML: bibliography: bib-final.bib
  • bad chunk label: {r my_plot}
  • good chunk label: {r my-plot}
• if you want to deploy the gitbook via GitHub pages, then the /docs folder must contain a file called .nojekyll

• at the moment only PDF and HTML output have been properly implemented; I may improve on the Word output further down the line

Enjoy!