Feature suggestion

[dmuck]

Hey Steve,

As someone who is at the proposal stage of the dissertation, I've been thinking about how to implement an efficient workflow to save time down the line. Your project goes a long way toward that end. Thank you.

I like the conditional evaluation feature, and I think you could take that a step further by allowing for conditional evaluation of different sections of the manuscript.

I'm thinking of people who might be working on something larger than a journal article or technical report, something with more moving parts that are assembled incrementally, such a moving from a project proposal to multiple chapters to a finished product.

I'm not sure whether you'd want to incorporate this type of feature into the makefile (e.g., rather than make all, something like make part), or as an option in the ms.Rmd script; but this could be a useful addition to the workflow for people who might have pieces of a project that evolve separately and need flexibility in outputting documents before the disjoint pieces fit together into a coherent whole.

Let me know if you have questions. Thanks again for the public goods!

Dan

[svmiller]

I'm trying to wrap my head around what this might look like. My intuition here was clearly something like an academic manuscript. In which case, there is just one document. For something like a dissertation or a book, I'm not sure what that would resemble. This is where I confess my nascent knowledge of Make and how tethered I am to thinking of just one unifying analysis/document.

In other words, is there something in {bookdown} that incorporates Makefiles? That might be a good place to start looking.

[dmuck]

One way might be to incorporate {targets} which automates parts of the workflow.

More info here