Although this template provides a basic skeleton for a UvA thesis, at some point you’re bound to run into its limitations. Maybe you’re in a field that has some specific formatting requirements, or you simply want to make it more your own. There are a few things you can do1:
After you drafted the template, there should be a
template.tex file in the folder (check it out on GitHub here).
This file holds all of the LaTeX formatting commands that determine the
look of the thesis, and can be changed at your will.
includes option
If you just want to add a few LaTeX commands, you might not have to
change the template itself. Instead, you could create a new file and
include it so that the commands will be executed. For example,
you could include the LaTeX caption package to customize
the look of your figure/table captions. You would then save the command
\usepackage{caption} (along with any other commands) in a
file (typically called preamble.tex) in the thesis template
folder. Then, to include the file, specify the following YAML options in
your index.Rmd file:
output:
bookdown::pdf_book:
includes:
in_header: preamble.texFor more, see this
section of the bookdown manual, and check out the
preamble.tex file I used in my
own thesis.
Sometimes you’re after a small local fix, not a general change to the
format of the thesis. In that case you can simply insert the raw LaTeX
code in your .Rmd file, and it should be automatically
interpreted. If this ever goes wrong (i.e. the raw TeX is still included
the output), or if you want to write a more extensive section of LaTeX,
try explicitly indicating that it should be interpreted as LaTeX code,
by enclosing your code within a LaTex code block:
```{=latex}
Your TeX here
```You’ll find examples of raw TeX strewn throughout the template. For
example, you can quickly insert some white space with
\bigskip, or change the font size to small with
\small.
One of the easiest ways to change the overall look of your thesis is
to change the document class. By default, the template use one of the
standard classes: book (others include
e.g. article or report, which are less
suitable for a PhD thesis). Many universities have written their own
document class for PhD theses, according to their own formatting
guidelines, but as far as I know, the UvA has not. However, there are
other LaTeX packages that provide custom classes which are easier to
customize than the standard book class.
For my thesis, I used the memoir class from the memoir package. Memoir
provides multiple good-looking default styles that are very easy to
apply. For example, to change the chapter style (the look of
your chapter headings) to that of the LaTeX
Companion book, all you’d have to do is include
\chapterstyle{companion} (e.g. in your
preamble.tex file). Tweaking these styles or making your
own is also comparatively easy with Memoir, as the package provides lots
of useful commands to do so. Memoir also has an incredibly
detailed manual, that even provides some general advice on
typesetting and the like.
To change the document class, simply change the YAML option in
index.Rmd to one of your choosing, e.g.:
documentclass: memoir # the default is bookNote that there are also other good options for the document class
than book or memoir, such as the classes from
the koma-script
package.
The surest way to change the font of your thesis is to pick one of
the freely available fonts from the LaTeX Font Catalogue. For
example, to change the font to (EB) Garamond, just add the
\usepackage{ebgaramond} command (e.g. in your
preamble.tex file).
But you can in principle use any font you have installed on your
system. To do that, you will have to switch the LaTeX engine from the
default (pdflatex) to xelatex for instance.
This also gives you access to the mainfont yaml option (as
well as a few others; see the pandoc
documentation), where you can specify the name of the font you want
to use, e.g.:
output:
bookdown::pdf_book:
latex_engine: xelatex
mainfont: Times New RomanNote that all of these concern changes to the PDF
outputs only. The bookdown html template is basically fixed
and cannot be customized much (but see this
package for an easy way to make some customizations by changing the
underlying css).↩︎