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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Fork the repository on Github
- Clone the repository onto your local computer (or download the Zip file).
- Navigate to the directory that contains the Makefile and type
make pdf
(ormake html
) at the command line to update the PDF (or HTML) in the output directory. - Edit the files in the 'source' directory, then goto step 4.
- Type
grunt watch
to automatically compile changes.
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.