Big Book of R

Tangentially, R can help produce living Markdown documents (.Rmd files). A couple of ways include pandoc with knitr[0] or my FOSS text editor, KeenWrite[1]. I've kept the R syntax in KeenWrite compatible with knitr. Living documents as part of a build process can produce PDFs that are always up-to-date with respect to external data sources[2], which includes source code.

[0]: https://yihui.org/knitr/

[1]: https://keenwrite.com/

[2]: https://youtu.be/XSbTF3E5p7Q?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzP...

Last time I was working on something complex, I was able to knit from Rmd to md, and then use my usual pandoc defaults, which was quite neat. Big recommendation on that workflow.

There is also Quarto, which I have had a good experience with: https://quarto.org/

R is beautiful for writing data rich books and websites. I started with rmarkdown but believe that most of the new developments are now in quarto?

I'm more excited about https://typst.app/

Quarto can output to Typst (as well as many other outputs simultaneously, e.g. .docx, HTML, PDF, PPT, etc) for it's typesetting capabilities. https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/typst.html

Yes, that's correct. Quarto is language agnostic and Posit has chosen that route over just being an R shop.

Typst has been the biggest discovery in my technical toolkit in the last year. Such a huge step up from LaTeX, and I never thought I'd say that.

My typesetting Markdown series explores weaving knitr and pandoc together:

https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/07/11/typesetting-markdow...

However, most workflows and nearly all editors don't support interpolated variables. To address this, first I developed a YAML preprocessor:

https://repo.autonoma.ca/yamlp.git

Then I grew tired of editing YAML files, piping files together, and maintaining bash scripts. So next, I developed KeenWrite to allow use of interpolated variables directly within documents from a single program. The screenshots show how it works:

https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html