(Note that the Reed Senior Thesis has been updated and can be found here. Please use the thesisdown package instead if you are looking to build a senior thesis.)
The reedtemplates package (formerly named rticles but changed due to ambiguity with the package at rstudio/rticles) includes a set of R Markdown templates that enable authoring of journal and conference submissions, e-books, class projects, and a variety of other reports. Currently, this package only includes a template for creating a senior thesis at Reed College. If you'd like to see the PDF document the template produces, it can be found here.
Under the hood, LaTeX templates are 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 knitr.
Using reedtemplates has some prerequisites which are described below. To compile PDF documents using R, you are going to need to have LaTeX installed. It can be downloaded for Windows at http://http://miktex.org/download and for Mac at http://tug.org/mactex/mactex-download.html. Follow the instructions to install the necessary packages after downloading the (somewhat large) installer files. You may need to install a few extra LaTeX packages on your first attempt to knit as well.
To use reedtemplates from RStudio:
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Install the latest RStudio.
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Install the reedtemplates package:
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("ismayc/reedtemplates")- Use the New R Markdown dialog to create an article from one of the templates:
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Install pandoc using the instructions for your platform.
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Install the rmarkdown and reedtemplates packages:
install.packages("rmarkdown")
devtools::install_github("ismayc/reedtemplates")- Use the
rmarkdown::draftfunction to create articles:
rmarkdown::draft("MyThesis.Rmd", template = "reed_thesis", package = "reedtemplates")