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Can somebody explain to me why they would download a programming language just to write a technical paper? I get that it's a replacement for TeX, but with a name like Bookdown, I expect it to be as simple as Markdown in terms of setup.
Can somebody explain to me why they would download a programming language just to write a technical paper? I get that it's a replacement for TeX, but with a name like Bookdown, I expect it to be as simple as Markdown in terms of setup.
It's not a replacement for TeX. R originally had Sweave for weaving R and text together. Then we got Rmarkdown, which introduced the use of markdown for authoring documents via pandoc, but the output document only had simple features like headers, sub headers, emphasis and so on. Now Yuhui from Rstudio (who's been prolific in this area) has written bookdown for authoring books with rmarkdown. It's not for authoring s…
> It's not for authoring statistical papers (as the other comments stated
I looked at two randomly selected pages in two randomly selected books on the homepage (I swear I didn't click on more than those two to select examples that fit my narrative), both show it's being used just as I said.
- http://r4ds.had.co.nz/exploratory-data-analysis.html
- https://bookdown.org/robertkck/ecf_draft/low-carbon-is-promi... (this one has interactive graphics)
My reply was aimed at someone who doesn't seem to know any of the background story.
I agree with you that it's a nice tool for a lot of purposes.
I'm writing a ~150 page monograph. As the document evolved, organizing the prose and reordering the structure gradually became too cumbersome in plain text Markdown files (whether I used R Studio or some other editor). So I shifted my writing over to Scrivener---the best long-form writing tool I've ever used, highly recommended.
I write RMarkdown in Scrivener and compile the document into plain text. I manage my reference materials Zotero and export bibtex bibliography. Bookdown then takes the two files, incorporates all my calculations, tables, plots, and figures, and outputs a beautifully rendered document.
I _love_ Bookdown, but only once I figured out how to incorporate it into my writing workflow. I'm writing a ~150 page monograph. As the document evolved, organizing the prose and reordering the structure gradually became too cumbersome in plain text Markdown files (whether I used R Studio or some other editor). So I shifted my writing over to Scrivener---the best long-form writing tool I've ever used, highly recomme…
Anyone know what markup language was used to express the math equations? Was that Tex or something else?
I _love_ Bookdown, but only once I figured out how to incorporate it into my writing workflow. I'm writing a ~150 page monograph. As the document evolved, organizing the prose and reordering the structure gradually became too cumbersome in plain text Markdown files (whether I used R Studio or some other editor). So I shifted my writing over to Scrivener---the best long-form writing tool I've ever used, highly recomme…
Why was the prose and reordering too cumbersome? was it updating all the references or something else?
I don't know if this process is a sign that I'm an amateur writer or not, but Scrivener makes document organization incredibly simple compared to writing in a normal text editor. It also enables me to keep my notes sorted without interfering with the prose.
By the way, updating all the references is very easy using Bookdown and a bibtex bibliography.
---
title: "An Impressive Book"
author: "Li Lei and Han Meimei"
output:
bookdown::gitbook:
lib_dir: assets
split_by: section
config:
toolbar:
position: static
bookdown::pdf_book:
keep_tex: yes
bookdown::html_book:
css: toc.css
documentclass: book
---Softcover is something similar written in ruby that uses a combination of markdown with latex where necessary to generate HTML, PDF, ePub, and mobi book formats. It is what Michael Hartl uses (and created iirc) to build Rails Tutorial.
While it seems tightly linked with the Softcover publishing service, you can use the files it generates pretty much anywhere in my experience.
Can somebody explain to me why they would download a programming language just to write a technical paper? I get that it's a replacement for TeX, but with a name like Bookdown, I expect it to be as simple as Markdown in terms of setup.
First of all, this is for statistics based papers, not just "technical papers". The "R" in the URL and also in the language itself shows that focus. So if you have to first download R (and RStudio) you may not be the target audience. The benefit of RMarkdown publications is that they contain the code to reproduce every single step in the argument - as far as it is based on data. Examples from me, made for a course on…
The blog post is not really long, and in the fourth paragraph, I wrote:
> [...] We used books and R primarily for examples in this book, but bookdown is not only for books or R. Most features introduced in this book also apply to other types of publications: journal papers, reports, dissertations, course handouts, study notes, and even novels. You do not have to use R, either. Other choices of computing languages include Python, C, C++, SQL, Bash, Stan, JavaScript, and so on, although R is best supported. You can also leave out computing, for example, to write a novel.
Perhaps one thing I didn't make clear enough is that (you are right that) R (optionally RStudio) should be downloaded to use bookdown locally, but your document or book does not have to be related to R or statistics at all. However, I do agree that people who don't use R probably won't care about downloading R in the first place to use bookdown, so even if bookdown is sort of "general-purpose", the actual major audience is likely to be those doing statistics and data analysis using R.
That said, Sections 5.5 and 6.2 of the bookdown book have shown how to use bookdown on Github and Travis CI: https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/ That way, you don't have to install R locally. All you need to do is to commit changes to Github, and the book can be built automatically on Travis and published to Github pages. The author has to find someone to help him/her set up these services, though.