html format book length needs a new framework

[eddelbuettel]

The tufte-book class made the tintBook pdf variant possible.

There is nothing (yet) for html that is really comparable. The gitbook default for bookdown has a tufte variant but I find it lacking. The navigation bar is pretty awful.

We would need some proper js / css / html help, and it may be a fair amount of work. In the meantime, the pdf variant is functional.

[eddelbuettel]

I had jotted down some possible alternatives in other places; maybe having them here is fine too:

• mdBook in Rust, tighter visual fit: https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/mdBook, example at https://rust-lang-nursery.github.io/mdBook/
• OpenReviewToolkit https://github.com/open-review-toolkit, example at http://www.bitbybitbook.com/en/code/ -- has commerical / publisher overtones
• SocViz by @kjhealy is free-as-in-beer, and very close: http://socviz.co/ but has no repo :disappointed:

[coatless]

Reach out to @kjhealy via academic mail (email) and the new thingie all kids do nowadays (twitter) to no avail.

I'll likely have time to work on modifying a theme in mid-May for the html books. Until then, I'll enable the pdf tint version on the repos.

[coatless]

tint::tintBook() doesn't respect the output_dir parameter for render()

bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", "tint::tintBook", output_dir = "./_book/")

[eddelbuettel]

Hm.

[lf-araujo]

Since @coatless pointed it out here I will piggyback:

1. I can confirm the output directory is not respected and
2. for some reason internal references of the form @ref(fig:ambiente) are not working in tintBook

Also, is natbib the default? In order to use citeproc, I have to citation_package: none

[eddelbuettel]

Sure. I don't use output_dir=... so many things could go on there.

Ditto for bibliographies. I happen to use natbib and like it. The principal client of the package is ... me.

But this discussion is entirely on the wrong issue ticket, so can we please stop it now? This ticket is about the need for html extensions. Thanks.

[ssp3nc3r]

• SocViz by @kjhealy is free-as-in-beer, and very close: http://socviz.co/ but has no repo 😞

Looks like Kealy has a repo for another book with either the same or similar formatting:

https://github.com/kjhealy/plain-text.co

Is this what you need?

[coatless]

@ssp3nc3r yes. Exactly. Thanks!