RPI Thesis Toolkit Unofficial · community-made
Guide topics

Make it better for everyone

Made by students, for students. A question, a tip, or a fix you found the hard way makes it better for you and for everyone writing after you. None of these needs LaTeX or GitHub skills, and everyone taking part follows the code of conduct.

Three ways to help

1. Use the form (no account). The help and feedback form, linked from ask for help, takes questions, suggestions, tips, and test reports. It is a full contribution: much of the guide started as someone's question.

2. Open an issue. An issue is a public note on the project's Issues tab (free GitHub account needed). Click New issue and pick LaTeX help or bug or Suggest an improvement or share a tip. Write in your own words, screenshots welcome, and leave out private research and personal details. The maintainer replies on the issue and may turn it into a change.

3. Propose a change (a pull request), ideally with your own AI assistant. A pull request is a proposed change the maintainer reviews before it goes in. You do not have to know the steps: give an assistant that can edit files and use GitHub this prompt:

Read AGENTS.md in https://github.com/diyanko/rpi-thesis-toolkit and follow its "Contributing as an agent" steps. If you cannot fork or push, stop and show me the diff. Do not push or open the pull request until I approve. What I'd like changed: [describe it].

The assistant then:

  1. makes a fork, your own copy of the project on GitHub;
  2. makes one focused change on a branch, a named set of changes kept apart from the main version;
  3. runs the checks and shows you the result. Nothing is posted until you approve.

Prefer to do it by hand? Fork, branch, make one focused change, and fill in the short pull request template. The guide is Markdown in docs/; edit the .md file only. If you use a terminal, python3 scripts/verify.py (py instead of python3 on Windows) prints a last line to paste into the pull request, and skips checks it cannot run on your computer. Automated checks run on every pull request anyway, and a failure is fine: the maintainer helps finish.

Not sure how an issue should read? Ask any AI chat to help you write it, and leave out anything private from your thesis. Never include your own thesis files or data in an issue or pull request.

Especially welcome

Tools and workflows that saved you time; notes for your department or field; edge cases and their fixes; corrections to the guide; test reports from Windows, Linux, other editors, and Overleaf; and related academic formatting (a journal version of a chapter, defense slides, a poster) as short tips. Interested in reviewing pull requests or helping maintain? Say so in an issue or the form; maintainers start with maintenance.

When your help is used, the maintainer asks whether you would like a credit on the credits page. Credit is optional. Much of this project is drafted with AI agents; every change gets a human review, and saying that you used AI is fine.

What needs evidence

Not sure where a rule comes from? Open the pull request anyway and say so.

Permission and ownership

Submit only material you are entitled to contribute. New original code and documentation are offered under this project's MIT license, which does not cover RPI materials or anyone's research. Never add RPI-owned files (the seal, the original template, manuals, checklists, or slides); link to RPI's pages instead (what's ours and what isn't). A published thesis or a downloadable document is not automatically reusable. No contributor license agreement is required.

This repository is for the toolkit, not anyone's thesis. The project is unofficial and community-made; contributions never imply RPI or OGE approval. Publishing, or contacting OGE on the project's behalf, needs explicit maintainer authorization.

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