Penn dissertation template

This is a template for a Penn Economics/Finance/AppliedEcon style dissertation. See the example document with placeholder text here.

The main file is dissertation.tex. Add custom packages and formatting as needed to the preamble.

Front matter (the abstract, copyright notice, dedication, and acknowledgements), are in the folder frontmatter, and should be modified appropriately or removed if necessary.

Include your paper contents (excluding the preamble and references, of course), where chapterX.tex is currently, replacing \input{content/chapter1.tex} with your own work.

Place all figures in the figures directory and refer to them in your paper with the figures/figureX prefix.

aggregator.sh can be used to pull the latest version of your papers to the full_chapters folder; it also runs body_extractor.R, which gives an R script for automatically assembling the papers together into your dissertation's format and creating the properly named files in content/.

It relies on using the customized \TAG{label} created with the verbatim package in LaTeX and defined as \newcommand{\TAG}[1]{}, inspired by this Q&A. body_extractor.R also deals with some other idiosyncrasies of having written the paper with the rmarkdown/knitr packages, and has a fair amount of idiosyncrasies that you'll have to handle yourself -- my hope is that the examples of such covered here are enough to make generalization easier.

Here's one possible complete work flow for creating your dissertation:

1. Fork this repository and/or clone locally.
2. Tune aggregator.sh and body_extractor.R to the unique parts of your dissertation. Run sh aggregator.sh in this folder.
3. Define the following in dissertation.tex: \thetitle, \theauthor, \theadvisor, \THEAUTHOR, \THEADVISOR, theyear. Also rename/insert/delete the chapters in \chapter{Chapter Name} and \input{content/_chapter_name_}.
4. Compose your abstract, acknowledgment, copyright, dedication, and title in frontmatter/.
5. Compose your introduction and conclusion in content/.
6. Build dissertation.tex with, e.g., pdflatex (I personally use the LaTeX tools plugin to SublimeText 3)

Check the university's style guidelines to adjust for changes.