Editing LaTeX Dissertation Formatting Tips (section)

== Project Organization ==

You probably want to break your dissertation up into several different <code>.tex</code> files. Although I prefer to work on paper-length projects of 8,000 to 14,000 words or so in a single file, for a book or dissertation-length project it clearly makes more sense to keep each chapter in a different file. Building a very large <code>.tex</code> project can take too long. Very long files are more cumbersome to edit, even when using a powerful editor like Emacs. You are likely to publish different chapters as stand-alone articles. Indeed, the central 3 chapters of my dissertation were composed as stand-alone research articles, and two of them were under review when I defended.

To synchronize the publication and dissertation versions of these articles, I created a special <code>git</code> branch in the repositories for each project. The sole purpose of these branches was to make it convenient to merge any changes I made to the articles into the dissertation.<br />
I added the <code>.tex</code> files from these project-repositories into my dissertation project using a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_link symbolic links].<br />
I used [https://yihui.org/knitr/ <code>knitr</code>] to build my tables and figures in these projects, but I did not find it necessary to include the knitr source code in my dissertation project. So when I edited these chapters, I worked on the <code>knitr</code> files (<code>.Rtex</code>) in the project repositories. To bring these changes into the dissertation, I ran knitr and then, in a manual step, edited the resulting <code>*.tex</code> files to turn them from stand-alone LaTeX projects into <code>memoir</code> chapters, as described below. I then used the <code>\input</code> LaTeX command to insert the contents of <code>.tex</code> files into the main document.  I used the git branches to track these versions of the <code>.tex</code> files.

I realize I could have used a more careful organization of my LaTeX projects to avoid the manual step. ''C’est la vie.'' For simplicity, I didn’t include all the project-specific stuff in <code>cdsc_examples_repositories</code> and just copied the final <code>.tex</code> files instead.<br />
If you need some help reproducing this workflow in your project, please reach out to [[User:groceryheist|Nate]].