Thesis for osm2vectortiles

This is the thesis associated with the geometalab/osm2vectortiles project. The project contains issues regarding the documentation and other tasks that don't belong to the project repository.

The thesis is written in Markdown based on the tompollard/phd_thesis_markdown template.

Why is the thesis written in Markdown?

The plain text format is easy to work with and allows us to convert it to a bunch of other formats.

A more exhaustive list of reasons can be found here.

Setup

How is the template organized?

• README.md => these instructions.
• LICENSE => terms of reuse (MIT license).
• Makefile => contains instructions for using Pandoc to produce the final thesis.
• source/ => directory to hold the thesis content. Includes the references.bib file.
• source/figures/ => directory to hold the figures.
• style/ => directory to hold the style documents.

How do I get started?

1. Install the following software:
   • A text editor, like Sublime, which is what you'll use write the thesis.
   • A LaTex distribution (for example, MacTex for Mac users).
   • Set the PATH variable to the directory where MacTex is installed export PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2015/bin/x86_64-darwin:$PATH
   • Pandoc, for converting the Markdown to the output format of your choice. You may also need to install Pandoc cite-proc to create the bibliography.
   • Git, for version control.
2. Fork the repository on Github
3. Clone the repository onto your local computer (or download the Zip file).
4. Navigate to the directory that contains the Makefile and type make pdf (or make html) at the command line to update the PDF (or HTML) in the output directory.
5. Edit the files in the 'source' directory, then goto step 4.
6. Type grunt watch to automatically compile changes.

What else do I need to know?

Some useful points, in a random order:

• each chapter must finish with at least one blank line, otherwise the header of the following chapter may not be picked up.
• add two spaces at the end of a line to force a line break.
• the template uses John Macfarlane's Pandoc to generate the output documents. Refer to this page for Markdown formatting guidelines.
• PDFs are generated using the Latex templates in the style directory. Fonts etc can be changed in the tex templates.
• To change the citation style, just overwrite ref_format.csl with the new style. Style files can be obtained from citationstyles.org/
• For fellow web developers, there is a Grunt task file (Gruntfile.js) which can be used to 'watch' the markdown files. By running $ npm install and then $ npm run watch the PDF and HTML export is done automatically when saving a Markdown file.
• You can automatically reload the HTML page on your browser using LiveReload with the command $ npm run livereload. The HTML page will automatically reload when saving a Markdown file after the export is done.