rmarkdown

Single-source publishing for R users

A big part of my work includes putting content about R online, in blog posts and online books. I’m therefore very interested in the technical infrastructure that allows us R users to produce beautiful products out of R Markdown or Markdown source files. In this post I shall summarize my recent experiments around making HTML and PDF versions of books. Thanks to Julie Blanc’s inspiring post in French, I have learnt this is called single-source publishing.

Pets or livestock? Naming your RMarkdown chunks

Today I made a confession on Twitter: I told the world I had spent my whole career not naming chunks in RMarkdown documents. Even if I had said one should name them when teaching RMarkdown. But it was also a tweet for showing off since I was working on the first manuscript with named chunks and loving it. I got some interesting reactions to my tweet, including one that made me feel better about myself (sorry Thomas), and other ones that made me feel like phrasing why one should name RMarkdown chunks.

Hadley Wickham asked whether chunks were pets or livestock, as in his analogy for models. Livestock chunks are identified by numbers, not names, in the case of chunks defined by position. I now think we have good reason to consider them as pets and here’s why…