Converting blogdown site to bookdown/PDF

Publishing Your Results
1

I've built a couple college courses using blogdown (see https://datavizf17.classes.andrewheiss.com/, for instance), and it's been delightful building a whole website (with assignments, lectures, etc.) with R.

In academia, though, the world runs on static files, and I've gotten a lot of requests to submit/share the course as a PDF document (for evaluations, tenure packets, and whatnot). That should, in theory, be really easy since the whole course site is just a set of Rmd files. However, files in a blogdown project are not structured in a way that works automatically with bookdown—with blogdown, everything lives in a content directory, with files nested in subdirectories there, like so (see https://github.com/andrewheiss/dataviz.andrewheiss.com):

content
├── _index.Rmd
├── _output.yaml
├── assignment
│   ├── 01-assignment.Rmd
│   └── 02-assignment.Rmd
├── class
│   ├── 01-class.Rmd
│   └── 02-class.Rmd
├── reading
│   ├── 01-reading.Rmd
│   └── 02-reading.Rmd
├── schedule.Rmd
└── syllabus.Rmd

What would be the best way to convert a blogdown site to a single static PDF? Here's what I've thought about so far:

  • Copy each file from the blogdown site to a new bookdown site, renaming each file so that the order is correct.
    • Pros: Uses bookdown
    • Cons: Lots of manual work; any changes to the blogdown site later won't be picked up by the bookdown version
  • Symlink each file from the blogdown site to a new bookdown site, again renaming each file so that the order is correct
    • Pros: Uses bookdown; symlinks ensure that the most recent version of each Markdown file is used
    • Cons: Still lots of manual upfront work
  • Set keep_md: yes in the YAML heading in blogdown, copy/symlink all the generated Markdown files to a new directory, and use pandoc to build a big PDF, thus bypassing bookdown and knitr and all R-related software
    • Pros: No need to force Rmd files to fit bookdown's paradigm
    • Cons: Lots and lots of manual work

Unless I'm missing some magic create_pdf parameter in blogdown, I'm not seeing an easy way to create a single PDF from this blogdown site. Any ideas?

2

Currently there isn't an easy way (at least not straightforward), but you seem to be able to read my mind. This is exactly what I plan to implement in the future: turn (a subset of) a blogdown website to a book. I was literally thinking about it early this morning.

3

Oh cool, that sounds great! In the meantime, I'll just copy/paste/symlink away :slight_smile:

4

It is good to add this feature in the future version of blogdown.

Hope it will come soon!