NO WARRANTY that this works for current UCD requirements ;)

• Download all the files here (use the HTTPS clone URL listed on the righthand side of GitHub repo)

• Using your favorite Editor

  • Edit metadata.md file with thesis details including title, abstract, program, and more (see the file and Metadata section below for more details)
  • Edit the .md files in chapters folder, add more if you need. Each filename should starting each with the numbered order in which they should appear. Note that the top-level section headers are chapter titles. See Using paper sources as chapters below for more possibilties.
  • add bibtex entires to example.bib (or change the bibliography file in metadata.md)

• Build

  • type make in a shell prompt, this will produce a mythesis.pdf (edit the Makefile if you'd like a different filename)

• There are many optional sections that you can add via metadata.md (more details below)

  • Dedication
  • Acknowledgments
  • Preface
  • Copyright page

In metadata.md is a YAML-formatted set of metadata for the thesis. Most field names are self-explanatory. The entries below 'abstract' deal with formatting. Some details on the others:

• iselectronic: 1 - yes, 0 - no
• isdissertation: 1 - PhD, 0 - MSc
• degreemonth: Choices are September, December, March, June

In addition to the above, there several optional fields. To use, these entries below should be cut/pasted into the metadata block in metadata.md (i.e., the entries between --- and ... )

Copyright page is optional. If you have one, it must immediately follow the title page. For more information about the copyright page see the UCD's Office of Graduate Studies web site.

copyrightpage: true

Dedication as a potentially multi-paragraph entry like the abstract

dedication: |

    For my parents

    and for my brothers

Acknowledgments as a potentially multi-paragraph entry like the abstract

acknowledgments: |
    A great many folks

    A second paragraph of folks

A preface can be included as a .tex file by giving the filename:

preface: preface.tex

It's handy to just in-line a paper into the thesis. Several features help with this.

Separate the body and title filenames, as is done in the provided example files. To ensure correct order use - for title files and _ for chapter body files, e.g. 1-title.md and 1_a-great-chapter.md. Note for .md sources you may have to increase the nesting of each heading. (You could use sed 's/^#/##/g' for this.)

Inline latex files, which you can do using the latex syntax \include{file} in a markdown file. An example is included in 3_chapter.md and 3_latexchapter.tex.

The following set of files are the components needed to write your thesis or dissertation using markdown (and ultimately LaTeX under the hood) for the University of California, Davis

Originally based on the File for a general UC Dissertation / Thesis

• Modified specifically to the UCD thesis class by Shwaine [email protected]
• 2006 - More recent changes by Dylan Beaudette
• 2010 Clarification and posting to github by Alex Mandel [email protected]
• 2011 E-filing tweak by Jason Moore
• 2014 Style updates to fit recent requirements
• 2015 Transition to markdown/pandoc by Jaime Ashander

(See the Changelog for more details)

Contact us with questions and updates, we've posted the source on github so it's easier to accept changes and allow people to post their own variations.

The markdown+pandoc version of the thesis template was built and debugged on OS X 10.10 using open-source software with version numbers listed below, it may work with different versions but no guarantees.

• pandoc >= 1.15
• pdfTeX 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.16 (TeX Live 2015)
• latexmk Version 4.43a
• biber 2.1
• GNU Make 3.81