Collaborating on R Markdown documents

[ClaudioZandonella]

Collaborating on R markdown documents is often required. However, proper tools for enhancing collaboration are missing. This is also discussed in the following topic:

Collaborating on R Markdown documents with non-R users

I've been using Distill more and more for creating HTML reports and documents with interactive features that I can easily share as email attachments/links, etc., and I really love it! One challenge that I'm running into (and this is certainly not specific to the Distill format) is easily collaborating with non-R users on these documents. For the most part, the collaboration would consist of edits to the text and comments and ideally be achieved in Word. The R Markdown Cookbook discusses the redoc package as a possible solution: https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/word-redoc.html. Although the package appears to not be in active development at this time. I'd love to hear any ideas…

I suggest you try trackdown Collaborative Editing of Rmd (or Quarto / Rnw) Documents in Google Drive • trackdown

trackdown offers a simple answer to collaborative writing and editing of R Markdown (or Sweave) documents. Using trackdown, the local .Rmd (or .Rnw) file is uploaded as plain-text in Google Drive where, thanks to the easily readable Markdown (or LaTeX) syntax and the well-known online interface offered by Google Docs, collaborators can easily contribute to the writing and editing of the narrative part of the document. After integrating all authors’ contributions, the final document can be downloaded and rendered locally.

Using Google Docs, anyone can collaborate on the document as no programming experience is required, they only have to focus on the narrative text ignoring code jargon.

Moreover, you can hide code chunks setting hide_code = TRUE (they will be automatically restored when downloaded). This prevents collaborators from inadvertently making changes to the code that might corrupt the file and it allows collaborators to focus only on the narrative text ignoring code jargon.

You can also upload the actual Output (i.e., the resulting complied document) in Google Drive together with the .Rmd (or .Rnw) document. This helps collaborators to evaluate the overall layout, figures and tables and it allows them to use comments on the pdf to propose and discuss suggestions.