Attribution, provenance, and licensing
The RPI Thesis Toolkit is an unofficial, community-made project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) or its Office of Graduate Education (OGE), and OGE has not reviewed or approved the class. It works with RPI's requirements and links to RPI's own resources.
On this page
What's ours and what isn't
| Whose | What | How this project treats it |
|---|---|---|
| Ours (the maintainer and contributors) | The class implementation (rpi-thesis.cls), starter examples, scripts, guides, diagrams, cheat sheet, and website |
Written for this project; offered under our license |
| RPI's | The formatting requirements and the OGE Dissertation and Thesis Manual and checklists; the original LaTeX template; the seal; the institution's name | We follow and link to them. We do not include, copy, or claim them, and our license does not cover them |
| The open-source ecosystem's | LaTeX and its packages (including BibLaTeX), Biber, latexmk, Pandoc, Zotero and Better BibTeX, and the website fonts (SIL Open Font License) | Used as tools or loaded by their public interfaces, under their own licenses, with credit below |
RPI's materials
The class is an independent implementation. It was informed by RPI's publicly available LaTeX template and by the OGE manual, but it contains no RPI files, and none are redistributed: not in the repository, the starter ZIP, or the website.
| Material | Credit and source | Treatment |
|---|---|---|
| OGE Dissertation and Thesis Manual (2026) | RPI Office of Graduate Education; submission page (opens in a new tab) | Read as the formatting authority; requirements explained in our own words in the requirements map; not bundled |
| Formatting and degree checklists (September 2025) | RPI Office of Graduate Education; same submission page | Used for cross-checking; not bundled |
| RPI's official LaTeX template | thesis.cls names Harriet Borton (ITS, 1996) and Michael Sofka (2018 changes); rpithesis-doc.tex names Client Information Services; available from RPI ITS's Thesis Preparation page (opens in a new tab) |
Compared, not copied; differences recorded in the requirements map. Maintainers keep a reference copy in _local/ (ignored by Git) |
| RPI seal | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; RPI ITS's Thesis Preparation page | Not distributed. Each student downloads it and saves it as assets/ (assets/README.md (opens in a new tab)); without it, the title page shows a placeholder |
docs/project/upstream-files.json is our own record of the original template files (names and SHA-256 hashes), so a maintainer can tell whether a local reference copy has changed. A hash is not a license and does not prove that a copy is the latest download.
Maintainer decision (14 Oct 2026): do not redistribute RPI materials, and point students to the current seal on RPI ITS's Thesis Preparation page to download themselves. Because nothing RPI-owned is redistributed, the project does not need redistribution permission. This is a project decision, not OGE approval or endorsement.
Open-source tools and fonts
| Material | Credit / source | Treatment in this project |
|---|---|---|
| LaTeX and installed packages | The LaTeX Project and the respective package authors; CTAN (opens in a new tab) | Loaded by their public interfaces; no package source bundled or relicensed |
| Biber and latexmk | Their authors, distributed with TeX Live and MiKTeX | Run by the build helper; not bundled |
| Pandoc | John MacFarlane and contributors; pandoc.org (opens in a new tab) | Builds the website and offline guide; not bundled |
| pdf.js | Mozilla and contributors; project page (opens in a new tab) (Apache License 2.0) | Bundled, unchanged, for the optional "Check your PDF" page: the legacy build of the pdfjs-dist npm package at the version pinned in site/, in site/ with its license text (LICENSE); shipped with the website only (the offline guide leaves the checker out); not covered by our license |
| Zotero and Better BibTeX | The Zotero project and the Better BibTeX authors | Recommended in the guide; not bundled |
| Fraunces typeface (website headings) | Phaedra Charles and Flavia Zimbardi (Undercase Type); github.com/undercasetype/Fraunces (opens in a new tab) | Latin-subset WOFF2 files from Google Fonts in site/; SIL Open Font License 1.1, text in site/; not covered by our license |
| Atkinson Hyperlegible Next typeface (website body text) | Braille Institute of America, designed with Applied Design Works; github.com/googlefonts/atkinson-hyperlegible-next (opens in a new tab) | Latin-subset WOFF2 files from Google Fonts in site/; SIL Open Font License 1.1, text in site/fonts/OFL-Atkinson-Hyperlegible-Next.txt; not covered by our license |
| Sample bibliography item | Leslie Lamport, LaTeX: A Document Preparation System, second edition, 1994 | Bibliographic record shows a real citation; no book content reproduced |
License boundaries
LICENSE.md applies only to our original work listed above. It grants no rights to RPI's name, seal, manuals, checklists, or original template, or to anyone's thesis text, figures, data, publications, or permission documents.
Do not copy student research examples from the manual into new samples. The examples here are newly written teaching text and invented table values. Contributions containing material from others need their own source and permission record.
Before publication
- Confirm that no RPI-owned file is tracked or in Git history, and that the starter ZIP and website contain none (see the public-release checklist (opens in a new tab)).
- Confirm that every public page presents the project as unofficial (style guide (opens in a new tab)).
- Obtain maintainer authorization before publication or any communication on the project's behalf.
Credit for the original template's authors does not imply that they, RPI, or OGE contributed to, support, or endorse this project.