I started to use the bookdown package with rmarkdown because I was jealous of the simple snytax of cross reference tables and figures in the bookdown package that is not supported in the native rmarkdown.

HUGOMORE42

Some thoughts on bookdown

I started to use the bookdown package with rmarkdown because I was jealous of the simple snytax of cross reference tables and figures in the bookdown package that is not supported in the native rmarkdown, and I came across quite a few other features that are extremely useful:

  • Embed shiny apps within the html with the knitr::include_app() function.
  • The bookdown output (gitbook) is possible to have mulitple contributors on github so readers can contribute from their own github to fix issues like typos or contribute ideas.
  • The book is live, which means you can change the font style, size, themes/backgrounds, share on social media, publish to bookdown.org etc, right out of the box.
  • Since the bookdown takes several instead of just one huge .rmd file, it’s easy to dump all your hugo blog posts that are in .rmd format in the bookdown folder for the first draft of your “book”.

ps: for more info, please check out Yihui Xie’s talk in 2016.