Support bookdown render functionality

[krishnakumarg1984]

The bookdown R-package helps in compiling multi-page HTML output resembling the gitbook formats which are absoloutely beautiful (and packed with usability features).

Currently, the supported key bindings do not account for bookdown and only cover single-page rendering of Rmarkdown documents. To clarify, bookdown is not a separate documentation format. It is simply RMarkdown syntax source files, but separated into multiple files (one per chapter) for long-form reports, books and theses.

Can you please provide suitable infrastructure to execute the bookdown::render_book function from within vim? Its calliogn syntax and default arguments are given below (extracted verbatim from the official documentation):

render_book(input, output_format = NULL, ...,
  clean = TRUE, envir = parent.frame(),
  clean_envir = !interactive(), output_dir = NULL,
  new_session = NA, preview = FALSE,
  config_file = "_bookdown.yml")

[paulrougieux]

In bookdown.org build-the-book, Yihui (the package author) recommends using a makefile. With a make file, book building can be started from vim in a separate buffer with:

:term make

The use of :term make instead of :make has the advantage of opening a new split, not blocking your current editing window. This is useful if your site takes a while to render, you can continue editing and working at the R prompt while it builds. A sample makefile is provided within the package at bookdown/inst/examples/Makefile.

[jranke]

You can also use

:make

[mikemc]

Another option that doesn't require any change to Nvim-R is to define your own shortcut to run bookdown::render_book() in the current session, similar to <LocalLeader>kr for standard Rmarkdown rendering. E.g. I put the following in ".vim/ftplugin/rmd.vim",

" Bookdown rendering
map <silent> <LocalLeader>kbb :call g:SendCmdToR("bookdown::render_book('.')")<CR>

which assumes the R working directory is the root of the book project; or you might instead replace '.' with here::here(). I would also like to have a shortcut to bookdown::preview_chapter(), e.g.

map <silent> <LocalLeader>kbc :call g:SendCmdToR("bookdown::preview_chapter(???)")<CR>

but I'm not sure what to replace ??? with to get the the file path to the current vim open file to be inserted into the command.

[paulrougieux]

define your own shortcut to run bookdown::render_book() in the current session

Using your current R session is not desirable when the sites takes more than a few seconds to render. I would recommend using another R session to render the site, so that you are able to continue interacting with R in the main session. Three ways to use another R session :

1. Render the site in a separate Vim split with a makefile containing

    render:
         Rscript -e "bookdown::render_book()"

2. Render the site in a separate tmux pane or vim split with a bash command (you can send that command from vim with slime)

    cd ~/project_repository/  &&  Rscript -e "bookdown::render_book()"

3. Use a continuous integration tool to build the site when you push to your remote git repository. (For example here is the configuration file .gitlab-ci.yml I use to build my blog on gitlab CI)