4 ms·
I _love_ Bookdown, but only once I figured out how to incorporate it into my writing workflow. I'm writing a ~150 page monograph. As the document evolved, org
by hoodwink 10y ago
I _love_ Bookdown, but only once I figured out how to incorporate it into my writing workflow.
I'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've ever used, highly recommended.
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.
- iamwil 10y agoWhy was the prose and reordering too cumbersome? was it updating all the references or something else?
- hoodwink 10y agoIt's just the process of organizing your ideas in a logical order. At the start, I have a bunch of ideas and I do my best to organize them into an outline. But as I begin writing and continue my research, I realize that some of my ideas suck, or I have new, better ideas, or I see a better way to share my ideas with the reader, so I need to constantly reorganize my document. I don't know if this process is a sign that I'm an amateur writer or not, but Scrivener makes document organization incredibly simple compared to writing in a normal text editor. It also enables me to keep my notes sorted without interfering with the prose. By the way, updating all the references is very easy using Bookdown and a bibtex bibliography.