/multi-bookdown

Primary LanguageCSS

multi-bookdown

multiple bookdowns for different purposes/audiences that share content

Working with data is a back and forth process where proper communication with the internal teams and clients is fundamental. As such, it is common to have multiple Rmd/md's prepared for different purposes/audiences. These documents might share some content. As conditions, analysis, models and results evolve, documents that share part of their content start to diverge. Then either having to modify multiple documents becomes a burden, or the number of documents increases painfully.

The idea of a multi-bookdown template came from discussions with my data scientist colleagues. Our aim was to find a way of producing several documents/reports that could share part of their content without having to go through each document and make changes to each one separately.

After exploring several file structures that could help us achieve this, we came up with the structure presented in this repository.

  • One advantage of the multi-bookdown file structure is that multiple bookdown projects can access Rmd/md files stored together in a separate folder outside each bookdown project folder.

  • Another advantage of this example is that it truly contains the minimal number of files that are required to render a bookdown, so looking into the contents of bookdown-1 should help getting started with any bookdown project.

how to use

Download ZIP of this repository.

  • Just place in the rmd folder all the Rmd/md files that the bookdowns will use
  • Create one bookdown-n folder per bookdown project.

For each bookdown project:

  • Change title, author and content of index.Rmd. Do not modify site, documentclass or output.
  • Modify _bookdown.yml by listing all the Rmd files that comprise each book. Make sure to use relative paths (../rmd/)
  • Run bookdown-minimal.Rprojand click the button Build Book on the Build tab
  • The html output is generated to the _book directory.

minimal example

This is a minimal multi-bookdown example.

Notice that each bookdown-n folder only contains: + index.Rmd   + _bookdown.yml   + _book folder   + bookdown-minimal.Rproj

Also, index.Rmdand _bookdown.yml contain the smallest amount of code to have multi-bookdown up and running!

where to find more

This repository is the result of several hours spent playing with bookdown and exploring previous work on the matter:

Hope this helps!

Sincerely,

m1ch3ll3