R package bookdownplus 1.0.2 released on CRAN

By Peng Zhao | June 22, 2017

I’m glad to announce that ‘bookdownplus 1.0.2’ (Zhao 2017) is now on CRAN. This post is a brief documentation of ‘bookdownplus 1.0.2’. However, I have been updating ‘bookdownplus’ frequently and the new version is more powerful and even easier. Please go to the GitHub site of bookdownplus.

Introduction

The R package bookdownplus is an extension of bookdown (Xie 2016). It is a collection of multiple templates on the basis of LaTeX, which are tailored so that I can work happily under the umbrella of bookdown. bookdownplus helps you write academic journal articles, guitar books, chemical equations, mails, calendars, and diaries.

Features

bookdownplus extends the features of bookdown, and simplifies the procedure. Users only have to choose a template, clarify the book title and author name, and then focus on writing the text. No need to struggle in YAML and LaTeX.

With bookdownplus users can

  • record guitar chords,
  • write a mail in an elegant layout,
  • write a laboratory journal, or a personal diary,
  • draw a monthly or weekly or conference calendar,
  • and, of course, write academic articles in your favourite way,
  • with chemical molecular formulae and equations,
  • even in Chinese,
  • and more wonders will come soon.

Full documentation can be found in the book R bookdownplus Textbook. The webpage looks so-so, while the pdf file might give you a little surprise.

Quick start

Although this section might not be the latest version, the general idea won’t change. Please see R bookdownplus Textbook to keep up with the update.

Preparation

Before starting, you have to install R, RStudio, bookdown package, and other software and packages (i.e. Pandoc, LaTeX, rmarkdown, rticle, knitr, etc.) which bookdown depends on. See the official manual of bookdown for details. Additionally, if you want to produce a poster, phython must be installed before using, and the path of phython might have to be added to the environmental variables for Windows users.

Installation

install.package("bookdownplus")
# or
devtools::install_github("pzhaonet/bookdownplus")

Generate demo files

Run the following codes, and you will get some files (e.g. index.Rmd, body.Rmd, bookdownplus.Rproj) and folders in your working directory.

getwd() # this is your working directory. run setwd() to change it.
bookdownplus::bookdownplus()

Build a demo book

Now open bookdownplus.Rproj with RStudio, and press ctrl+shift+b to compile it. Your will get a book file named *.pdf in _book/folder.

Write your own

Write your own text in index.Rmd and body.Rmd, and build your own lovely book.

More outputs

By default, the book is in a pdf file. From ‘bookdownplus’ 1.0.3, users can get more output formats, including ‘word’, ‘html’ and ‘epub’. Run:

bookdownplus::bookdownplus(template = 'article', more_output = c('html', 'word', 'epub'))

Recommendations

I have been developing some other packages, which bring more features into ‘bookdown’, such as:

  • mindr (Zhao 2017), which can extract the outline of your book and turn it into a mind map, and

  • pinyin (Zhao 2017), which can automatically generate ‘{#ID}’ of the chapter headers even if there are Chinese characters in them.

Both of them have been released on CRAN and can be installed via install.packages('mindr') and install.packages('pinyin').

Enjoy your bookdowning!

Showcase

  • article

  • article_mdpi1

  • article_zh

  • calendar

  • chemistry

  • guitar

  • journal

  • mail

  • poem

  • thesis_classic

  • thesis_ubt

  • thesis_zju

  • yihui_demo

  • yihui_mini

  • yihui_zh

Updates

  • 2017-06-23. 1.0.3.
    • Fixed a bug of thesis_classic.
    • Switched off warnings when creating folders.
    • Options to export epub, html, and word documents.
  • 2017-06-21. Released on CRAN!
  • 2017-06-21. 1.0.2. Resubmitted to CRAN!
  • 2017-06-21. 1.0.2. Resubmitted to CRAN!
  • 2017-06-21. 1.0.1. Submitted to CRAN!
  • 2017-06-14. 0.0.1. A bug fixed.
  • 2017-05-15. 0.0.0. A very preliminary version.

Xie, Yihui. 2016. Bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman; Hall/CRC. https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown.

Zhao, Peng. 2017. Bookdownplus: Generate Varied Books and Documents with R ’Bookdown’ Package. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=bookdownplus.

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