Quarto template for OSU thesis!

Writing a thesis is hard enough without wrestling with Word styles or LaTeX preambles. To make the formatting part easier, I built a Quarto custom format extension (extension osu) that handles OSU thesis formatting automatically for both PDF and Microsoft Word output.

What it does

The template takes care of the formatting requirements so you can focus on the science:

• Title page, abstract, and front matter generated from simple YAML fields (advisor name, degree, department, etc.)
• Table of contents, list of figures, and list of tables inserted automatically in the correct order
• OSU College of Forestry color scheme applied to hyperlinks, inline code, and code blocks.
• Chapter-level figure and table numbering (e.g., Figure 2.3, Table A.1)
• Appendix support with a separate list of appendices, list of appendix figures, and list of appendix tables — generated automatically when your appendices are substantial enough to warrant them (PDF output only).
• Per-chapter bibliographies for manuscript-style theses, in both PDF and Word output

Output formats

Both formats use the same source .qmd files — no duplicating content.

• PDF (osu-pdf) uses LaTeX under the hood with biblatex for citations, giving precise control over spacing, page layout, and appendix list infrastructure.

• Microsoft Word (osu-docx) uses a reference .docx for styles and a set of Lua filters to reconstruct front matter, per-chapter reference sections, and colored citation links in OpenXML.

Installation

quarto use template CoF-Stats/osu

This installs the extension and creates a starter .qmd file along with the suggested directory structure. Most of your writing goes in _chapters/, organized by chapter, with the main document acting as a stitching file that provides front-matter metadata.

your-thesis/
├── your_thesis.qmd          # YAML front matter + chapter includes
├── references.bib
├── _variables.yml           # project-wide variables (advisor, department, etc.)
├── _chapters/
│   ├── chapter1/
│   ├── chapter2/
│   └── appendices/
└── _extensions/osu/         # installed by quarto use template

Why use Quarto for my thesis?

• Highest standards of reproducible science. Every step can be version controlled, documented, and reproduced using Quarto and GitHub.

• No more Figure XX. Figure and table numbering is done automatically so you don’t need to go back through and update numbers.

• No more editing tables by hand as numbers change with new analyses. R, Python, or Julia code blocks compute the values and drop them directly into the final document.

• Templates reduce the amount of time spent formatting, allowing you to write in simple markdown blocks that get formatted behind the scenes.

Source

The extension is open source and hosted at github.com/CoF-Stats/osu-thesis-template. Issues and pull requests welcome.