Bookdown – Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown

If you use R on a daily basis this is a very nice feature.

R with Rstudio is making some major progress in using R for presenting. Rmarkdown, ReportRs for PowerPoint and now this.

I _love_ Bookdown, but only once I figured out how to incorporate it into my writing workflow.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;ve ever used, highly recommended.<p>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 still lose all formatting when copy-pasting code from the pdfs being generated. Why does that need to be a problem? Eg from page 47:<p><pre><code> --- title: &quot;An Impressive Book&quot; author: &quot;Li Lei and Han Meimei&quot; 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 ---</code></pre> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bookdown.org&#x2F;yihui&#x2F;bookdown&#x2F;bookdown.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bookdown.org&#x2F;yihui&#x2F;bookdown&#x2F;bookdown.pdf</a>

Can somebody explain to me why they would download a programming language just to write a technical paper? I get that it&#x27;s a replacement for TeX, but with a name like Bookdown, I expect it to be as simple as Markdown in terms of setup.

Has anyone used both Bookdown and Softcover [1] to compare the two?<p>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.<p>While it seems tightly linked with the Softcover publishing service, you can use the files it generates pretty much anywhere in my experience.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;softcover&#x2F;softcover" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;softcover&#x2F;softcover</a>

Anyone know what markup language was used to express the math equations? Was that Tex or something else?

I&#x27;ve been toying with <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;weasyprint.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;weasyprint.org</a> and Python markdown toward similar (but as yet unrealized) effects, and quite like the idea.<p>It&#x27;s not too hard to, say, write a Python Markdown extension to do the same using pandas, seaborn and the usual data science tools from the Python universe, but I salute the R folk for getting this done in what appears to be a quite consistent fashion.