Bookdown

The bookdown package is an R package and set of conventions for making books with Rmarkdown and RStudio. It's designed to produce both a website with one page per chapter, and a PDF for the entire book (future versions might also add epub support). The process is still rather idiosyncratic and tightly joined to my style of book writing, but it will probably get more flexible in time, and just seeing my approach (and code) might be useful to you.

Dependencies

To use bookdown, you'll need:

• make
• latekmk
• pandoc
• devtools::install_github("hadley/bookdown")

Local setup

• To build a single chapter, use Cmd + Shift + K to knit and preview.

• To rebuild the complete book, use Cmd + Shift + B to run the makefile and build both the website and the pdf.

• To rebuild everything from scratch, use Clean and Rebuild in the build pane.

Note that knitr caching is setup up so that all three ways of building a chapter use the same cache. This saves a lot of time, but can result in out-of-sync caches. It's best to regularly run make clean to start from a clean slate.

Remote setup (e.g. for travis)

The basic looks something like this:

language: r
sudo: required

script:
  - make

If you only want to build the website or pdf, use make html or make pdf. If you're building the PDF, you'll also need:

apt-packages:
  # Compresses pngs and fixes colour space problem
  - optipng
  # Tex system with nicest typography
  - texlive-xetex
  # install my favourite code font
  - fonts-inconsolata

before_script:
  # update latex code cache
  - sudo fc-cache -fv

If you're deploying to a website hosted on Amazon's S3, you'll need something like this:

deploy:
  provider: s3
  access_key_id: AKIAJYY6UT5EHUXEKWCA
  secret_access_key:
    secure: "Ogjfu+wBbKDtY1VJQnfGejNcxPx2iEwlSgEeTHC7M5jyuSIdYdaf0IbJ9LlDSxA/vcO/NbGOzEdPKevuiRgcU7Bj+J7tlOrvw6WC4R1RK4JQNowuxoDOwNlAvPD5O5DMiIwku+xbjcxyIwU1yPWIjCgpOmAAHMgBeYI+4+N9Ggk="
  bucket: adv-r.had.co.nz
  region: us-west-2
  local-dir: _site
  skip_cleanup: true