Prereqs for building the book

[syclik]

I needed to install these packages in R:

1. tufte
2. reshape

I'm sure I have a bunch already installed.

Where's a good place to put this info? I was originally going to modify the README.md with a ## Before building the book subsection, but then thought it could be useful to have an install.R script or something else programmatic.

[bob-carpenter]

I'm not sure. I'll drop it in the README.md for now. I'm not even using reshape, so no idea why it's necessary. I don't think it's kosher for me to put installs in the scripts themselves.

[blackball]

I tried to build PDF. A bunch of packages needed to be installed. Pandoc is also required.

It took me more than one hour to do it.

It will be nice if there's an up to date PDF or html version included.

[bob-carpenter]

I tried to build PDF. A bunch of packages needed to be installed. Also Pandoc is also required. It took me more than one hour to do it.

Sorry the install was so time-consuming. I'll update the README to indicate pandoc needs to be installed. Was there anything else other than that you needed to install besides the tufte, bookdown, and reshape R packages? Or other suggestions to make it easier for the next person? I'm pretty sure this stuff is all preinstalled in RStudio, but I prefer to not have an IDE running interference, so I also installed everything directly. And I can confirm it's a pain, even on a Mac. Everything about markdown and pandoc is painful, not the least of which is the examples-only doc and the mysterious context-specificity of the markdown itself.

It will be nice if there's an up to date PDF or html version included.

Thanks for the sugestion. I added a pdf and updated the README to point to it up front. It goes against my general principle of not committing derivative near-binaries, but then I don't want to make this inaccessible. I also updated the build-pdf shell script to drop it in the new location so I can hopefully remember to commit new version as it gets revised.

[blackball]

Hi @bob-carpenter , Thanks for your reply.

Was there anything else other than that you needed to install besides the tufte,
bookdown, and reshape R packages? Or other suggestions to make it easier for the next person?

There're also at least 3 other packages installed, but I don't remember since I was just in a quick trial-error-fix mode. Once I succeed, I uninstalled all of them.. I was using Debian 10, installing RStudio will break my current environment, it has some conflicts with my virtualbox installation. I think for most of the people, installing RStudio will be the easiest thing to do.

Everything about markdown and pandoc is painful, not the least of which is the examples-only doc and the mysterious context-specificity of the markdown itself.

Indeed. I recommend Typora, it's much easier to use.

[bob-carpenter]

Thanks for the reco. I'm a bit confused, though, as the doc says: Typora requires Pandoc (≥ v1.16). from: http://support.typora.io/Install-and-Use-Pandoc/

[blackball]

Yes.
Typora is something on top of Pandoc, it provides a WYSWYG interface for writing markdown and math equations. FYI: https://support.typora.io/Math/ .

The installation of Typora is way more simpler, for example, on debian platform, the instructions are https://www.typora.io/#linux .