Installation problems

[pzhaonet]

Installation problems

[pzhaonet]

Hi, @petzi53. Thank you so much for your comments. They mean a lot to me. Your feedback is not only a great improvement for bookdownplus, but also an surprising encouragement to me. Please see my reply as follows.

1. The bookdownplus.Rproj is not generated by bookdownplus v1.3.0, but by v1.3.1. It was my carelessness that I messed up with my scripts before uploading to CRAN. I am sorry for that. Now v1.3.1 cannot be uploaded to CRAN because it is larger than 5 MB. I have to spend some time in reducing the size.

2. Regarding the procedure on Mac OS, bookdownplus has been tested only on Windows. I do not have a Mac, so it is difficult for me to test it, although it should have. I have received very good comments from Mac users, including you, which would definitely help a lot in the future when I am able to buy (hopefully) a Mac in the future. I will specify this in the bookdownplus textbook.

Let's come to the bookdownplus.Rproj file again. When the first version of bookdownplus was released, RStudio did not support creating a bookdown project yet. Users had to download an .Rproj file from @yihui's demo before they were able to build a book from the toolbar or shortcut. This was why bookdownplus generates a bookdownplus.Rproj file for users. Now the new version of RStudio is able to create a bookdown project from the menu, it might be a more friendly way than bookdownplus.Rproj to some users. Well, bookdownplus.Rproj generated by bookdownplus is still my favorite way, because I get used to it. I will add an argument in bookdownplus() function to choose if .Rproj is generated or not.

For the long run I totally agree with you. It would be great that RStudio could provide some bookdown templates, not necessarily from bookdownplus, in the future. In fact, I developed bookdownplus just because there were/are no official templates from bookdown -- @yihui is too busy, and bookdown is so attractive to me that I could not wait. This motivation was written at the beginning of the bookdownplus textbook.

To be honest, the structures of bookdownplus templates are not satisfactory, although they do work well for my everyday use. I am neither an expert in R nor in LaTeX, which is a limitation for me to write fancy scripts. I am looking forward to more contributors to bookdownplus, so that bookdownplus could be improved. It might be a pilot library for official bookdown templates.

Thank you again for your nice feedback.

[yihui]

Yep, I'm here just to confirm I'm busy :)

Typically my priority is on developing general frameworks instead of considering specific use cases of a general framework. For example, I didn't invest much time on bookdown templates (I could, but I deliberately chose not to), and that is a perfect gap that bookdownplus can fill out. For the same reason, I don't want to work too hard on website templates for blogdown.

[petzi53]

Hi @pzhaonet, Thank you for your answer. I understand fully these limitations and had already abandoned my trial with bookdownplus in the moment. I am still struggling with the standard bookdown project ;-)

And thank you @yihui also for your reply. I agree with your decision: it would be a waste of your programming expertise to look into templates. I believe when bookdown is becoming more popular there will people who are interested to develop templates for different use cases.

[pzhaonet]

@petzi53 @yihui I was wondering if it is possible to test the compatibility of a program for Mac OS without buying a Mac?

[petzi53]

Sorry, I just know how to test windows programs on a mac. I have no experience from the windows perspective. The only thing I could offer is to test it for you and to report it to you.