12-bookdown.Rmd

# Books

We have introduced the basics of R Markdown in Chapter \@ref(documents), which highlighted how HTML, PDF, and Word documents can be produced from an R workflow. However, larger projects can become difficult to manage in a single R Markdown file. The **bookdown** package\index{bookdown} [@xie2016; @R-bookdown] addresses this limitation, and offers several key improvements:

- Books and reports can be built from multiple R Markdown files.

- Additional formatting features are added, such as cross-referencing, and numbering of figures, equations, and tables.

- Documents can easily be exported in a range of formats suitable for publishing, including PDF, e-books and HTML websites.

This book itself was created using **bookdown**, and acts as an example of what can be achieved. Despite the name containing the word "book", **bookdown** is not only for books, and it can be used for long reports, dissertations, or even single R Markdown documents (see Section \@ref(a-single-document)). It also works with other computing languages such as Python and C++ (see Section \@ref(language-engines)). If you want, you can even write documents irrelevant to computing, such as a novel.

In this chapter, we cover the basics of **bookdown**, and explain how to start a **bookdown** project. Much of the the content is based on the work "*bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown*" (https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/) of @xie2016, which provides more detailed explanations of the concepts highlighted.

## Get started {#bookdown-start}

You can install either the CRAN version or the development version on GitHub (https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown):

```{r eval=FALSE}
# install from CRAN
install.packages('bookdown')

# or GitHub
devtools::install_github('rstudio/bookdown')
```

If you use RStudio, you can start a new bookdown project from the menu `File -> New Project -> New Directory -> Book Project using bookdown`.^[Alternatively, the command `bookdown:::bookdown_skeleton(getwd())` will create a skeleton project in your current working directory.] Open the R Markdown file `index.Rmd`, and click the button `Build Book` on the `Build` tab of RStudio. This will compile the book and display the HTML version within the RStudio Viewer, which looks like Figure \@ref(fig:bookdown-template).  

```{r bookdown-template, echo=FALSE, fig.cap= "The HTML output of the bookdown template.", out.width='100%'}
knitr::include_graphics("images/bookdown-template.png", dpi = NA)
```

You may add or change the R Markdown files, and hit the `Knit` button again to preview the book. If you prefer not to use RStudio, you may also compile the book through the command line using `bookdown::render_book()`.

## Project structure {#bookdown-project}

Below shows the basic structure of a default **bookdown** project:

```markdown
directory/
├──  index.Rmd
├── 01-intro.Rmd
├── 02-literature.Rmd
├── 03-method.Rmd
├── 04-application.Rmd
├── 05-summary.Rmd
├── 06-references.Rmd
├── _bookdown.yml
├── _output.yml
├──  book.bib
├──  preamble.tex
├──  README.md
└──  style.css
```

As a summary of these files:

- `index.Rmd`: This is the only Rmd document to contain a YAML frontmatter as described within Chapter \@ref(basics), and is the first book chapter.

- Rmd files: A typical **bookdown** book contains multiple chapters, and one chapter lives in one Rmd file.

- `_bookdown.yml`: A configuration file for **bookdown**.

- `_output.yml`: It specifies the formatting of the HTML, LaTeX/PDF, and e-books.

- `preamble.tex` and `style.css`: They can be used to adjust the appearance and styles of the book output document(s). Knowledge of LaTeX and/or CSS is required.

These files are explained in greater detail in the following subsections.

### Index file

By default, all Rmd files are merged to render the book. The `index.Rmd` file is the first file when merging all Rmd files. You should and should only specify the YAML metadata in this file, e.g.,

```yaml
---
title: "A Minimal Book Example"
author: "Yihui Xie"
date: "`r "\x60r Sys.Date()\x60"`"
site: bookdown::bookdown_site
documentclass: book
bibliography: [book.bib, packages.bib]
biblio-style: apalike
link-citations: yes
description: "This is a minimal example of using
  the bookdown package to write a book."
---
```

### Rmd files

The rest of Rmd files must start immediately with the chapter title using the first-level heading, e.g., `# Chapter Title`.

- 01-intro.Rmd

    ```markdown
    # Introduction

    This chapter is an overview of the methods that
    we propose to solve an **important problem**.
    ```

- 02-literature.Rmd

    ```markdown
    # Literature

    Here is a review of existing methods.
    ```

By default, **bookdown** merges all Rmd files by the order of filenames, e.g., `01-intro.Rmd` will appear before `02-literature.Rmd`. Filenames that start with an underscore `_` are skipped.

### `_bookdown.yml`

The `_bookdown.yml` file allows you to specify optional settings to build the book. For example, you may want to override the order in which files are merged by including  the field `rmd_files`:

```yaml
rmd_files: ["index.Rmd", "02-literature.Rmd", "01-intro.Rmd"]
```

### `_output.yml`

The `_output.yml` file is used to specify the book output formats (see Section \@ref(bookdown-output)). Here is a brief example:

```yaml
bookdown::gitbook:
  lib_dir: assets
  split_by: section
  config:
    toolbar:
      position: static
bookdown::pdf_book:
  keep_tex: yes
bookdown::html_book:
  css: toc.css
```

## Markdown extensions {#bookdown-markdown}

The **bookdown** package expands upon the Markdown syntax\index{Markdown syntax} outlined in Section \@ref(markdown-syntax), and provides additional powerful features that assist longer documents and academic writing.

### Number and reference equations {#equations}

Section \@ref(math-expressions) highlighted how equations can be created using LaTeX syntax within Markdown. To number equations, put them in the `equation` environments, and assign labels to them using the syntax `(\#eq:label)`. Equation labels must start with the prefix `eq:` in **bookdown**. For example:

```latex
\begin{equation}
  E=mc^2
  (\#eq:emc)
\end{equation}
```

It renders the equation below \@ref(eq:emc):

\begin{equation}
  E=mc^2
  (\#eq:emc)
\end{equation}

### Theorems and proofs {#theorems}

Theorems and proofs provide environments that are commonly used within articles and books in mathematics. To write a theorem, you can use the syntax below:

````markdown
`r ''````{theorem}
Here is my theorem.
```
````

For example:

```{theorem, pyth, name="Pythagorean theorem"}
For a right triangle, if $c$ denotes the length of the hypotenuse
and $a$ and $b$ denote the lengths of the other two sides, we have

$$a^2 + b^2 = c^2$$
```

Theorems can be numbered and cross-referenced, as you can see from Theorem \@ref(thm:pyth). The `proof` environment behaves similarly to theorem environments but is unnumbered.

Variants of the `theorem` environments include: `r knitr::combine_words(names(bookdown:::theorem_abbr[-1]), before = '\x60')`. Variants of the `proof` environments include `r knitr::combine_words(names(bookdown:::label_names_math2[-1]), before = '\x60')`. The syntax for these environments is similar to the `theorem` environment, e.g., ```` ```{lemma}````.

### Special headers

There are two special types of first-level headers than can be used in **bookdown**:

- A part can be created using `# (PART) Part Title {-}` before the chapters that belong to this part.

- Appendices `# (APPENDIX) Appendix {-}`: All chapters after this header will be treated as the appendix. The numbering style of these chapters will be `A`, `B`, `C`, etc., and sections will be numbered as `A.1`, `A.2`, and so on.

### Text references

A text reference is a paragraph with a label. The syntax is `(ref:label) text`, where `label` is a unique identifier, and `text` is a Markdown paragraph. For example:

```markdown
(ref:foo) Define a text reference **here**.
```

Then you can use `(ref:foo)` to refer to the full text. Text references can be used anywhere in the document, and are particularly useful when assigning a long caption to a figure or including Markdown formatting in a caption. For example:

````markdown
Some text.

(ref:cool-plot) A boxplot of the data `iris` in **base** R.

`r ''````{r cool-plot, fig.cap='(ref:cool-plot)'}
boxplot(Sepal.Length ~ Species, data = iris)
```
````

### Cross referencing

The **bookdown** package extends cross-referencing in R Markdown documents and allows section headers, tables, figures, equations, and theorems to be cross-referenced automatically. This only works for numbered environments, and therefore requires figures and tables to be assigned a label. Cross-references are made in the format `\@ref(type:label)`, where `label` is the chunk label and `type` is the environment being referenced. As examples:

- Headers:

    ```markdown
    # Introduction {#intro}

    This is Chapter \@ref(intro)
    ```

- Figures:

    ````markdown
    See Figure \@ref(fig:cars-plot)

    `r ''````{r cars-plot, fig.cap="A plot caption"}
    plot(cars)  # a scatterplot
    ```
    ````

- Tables:

    ````markdown
    See Table \@ref(tab:mtcars)

    `r ''````{r mtcars}
    knitr::kable(mtcars[1:5, 1:5], caption = "A caption")
    ```
    ````

- Theorems:

    ````markdown
    See Theorem \@ref(thm:boring)

    `r ''````{theorem, boring}
    Here is my theorem.
    ```
    ````

- Equations:

    ````markdown
    See equation \@ref(eq:linear)

    \begin{equation}
    a + bx = c  (\#eq:linear)
    \end{equation}
    ````

Note that only alphanumeric characters (`a-z`, `A-Z`, `0-9`), `-`, `/`, and `:` are allowed in these labels.

## Output Formats {#bookdown-output}

The **bookdown** package includes the following output formats\index{output formats}:

- HTML:
    - `gitbook`
    - `html_book`
    - `tufte_html_book`
- PDF:
    - `pdf_book`
- e-book:
    - `epub_book`
- Single documents:
    - `html_document2`
    - `tufte_html2`
    - `pdf_document2`
    - `tufte_handout2`
    - `tufte_book2`
    - `word_document2`

### HTML

Although multiple formats are available for HTML books in **bookdown**, we will focus on the Gitbook style, which appears to be the most popular format. It provides a clean style, with a table of contents on the left. The design is fully responsive to make the content suitable for both mobile and desktop devices.

The output format `bookdown::gitbook` is built upon `rmarkdown::html_document`, which was explained in Section \@ref(html-document). The main difference between rendering in R Markdown and **bookdown** is that a book will generate multiple HTML pages by default. To change the way the HTML pages are split, the `split_by` argument can be specified. This defaults to `split_by: chapter`, but readers may prefer to use `split_by: section` if there are many sections within chapters, in which case a chapter page may be too long.

### LaTeX/PDF

There are limited differences between the output of `pdf_book()` in **bookdown** compared to `pdf_document()` in **rmarkdown**. The primary purpose of the new format is to resolve the labels and cross-references written in the syntax described in Section \@ref(cross-referencing).

Pandoc supports LaTeX commands in Markdown. Therefore if the only output format that you want for a book is LaTeX/PDF, you may use the syntax specific to LaTeX, such as `\newpage` to force a page break. A major disadvantage of this approach is that LaTeX syntax is not portable to other output formats, meaning that these changes will not be transferred to the HTML or e-book outputs.

### E-books

The e-book formats can be read on devices like smartphones, tablets, or special e-readers such as Kindle. You can create an e-book of the EPUB format with `bookdown::epub_book`.

### A single document

We highlighted in Section \@ref(bookdown-markdown) that **bookdown** extends the syntax provided by R Markdown, allowing automatic numbering of figures / tables / equations, and cross-referencing them. You may use **bookdown** within single-file R Markdown documents to benefit from these features. The functions `html_document2()`, `tufte_html2()`, `pdf_document2()`, `word_document2()`, `tufte_handout2()`, and `tufte_book2()` are designed for this purpose. To use this in a traditional R Markdown document, you can replace the output YAML option as follows:

````yaml
---
title: "Document Title"
output: bookdown::pdf_document2
---
````

## Editing {#bookdown-edit}

In this section, we explain how to edit, build, preview, and serve the book locally.

### Build the book

To build all Rmd files into a book, you can call the function `bookdown::render_book()`. It uses the settings specified in the `_output.yml` (if it exists). If multiple output formats are specified in it, all formats will be built. If you are using RStudio, this can be done through the `Build` tab. Open the drop down menu `Build Book` if you only want to build one format.

(ref:bookdown-build) The `Build` tab within RStudio highlighting **bookdown** output formats.

```{r bookdown-build, echo=FALSE, fig.cap="(ref:bookdown-build)", out.width='90%', fig.align='center'}
knitr::include_graphics("images/bookdown-build.png", dpi = NA)
```

### Preview a chapter

Building the whole book can be slow when the size of the book is big or your book contains large amounts of computation. We can use the `preview_chapter()` function in **bookdown** to only build a single chapter at a time. Equivalently, you can click the `Knit` button in RStudio.

### Serve the book

Instead of running `render_book()` or `preview_chapter()` each time you want to view the changes, you can use the function `bookdown::serve_book()` to start a live preview of the book. Any time a Rmd file is saved, the book will be recompiled automatically, and the preview will be updated to reflect the changes.

### RStudio addins

The **bookdown** package comes with two addins for RStudio which assist the editing of books:

- "Preview Book": this calls `bookdown::serve_book()` to compile and serve the book.

- "Input LaTeX Math": provides a text box which allows you to write LaTeX equations, to avoid common errors when typing the raw LaTeX math expressions.

## Publishing {#bookdown-publish}

You can generate books for both physical and electronic distribution. This section outlines some of the main options.

### RStudio Connect

The easiest way to publish books online is through https://bookdown.org, which is a website provided by RStudio to host your books for free. Books can be pushed to this website by using `bookdown::publish_book()`. You will need to sign up for an account at https://bookdown.org/connect/, and your login details will be used to authorize **bookdown** the first time you call the `publish_book()` function.

### Other services

You can host your book online with many other web services, such as Netlify or GitHub (via [GitHub Pages](https://pages.github.com)). Because the output from `bookdown::render_book()` is a collection of static files, you can host them using the same methods of hosting normal web pages.

### Publishers

You can consider publishing physical copies of your book with a publisher or using self-publishing. Many publishers provide LaTeX style classes that can be used to set the overall appearance of the book, and these can be used easily by setting the `documentclass` option in the YAML metadata of `index.Rmd`. Further customization of the appearance of the PDF book can be achieved by altering the LaTeX preamble via the `includes: in_header` option of `bookdown::pdf_book`.