April 2021

There were 2 posts published in April 2021 (this is page 1 of 1).

A first look at Bookdown for book publishing

I recently completed the first draft of a book using Google Docs (subject is how to create a social media presence through your own web site and newsletter), but when I saved a copy as a PDF, it did not look as good as I would like. I had been considering trying out Scribus (an open source desktop publishing tool), but had read about the Bookdown toolset when I was looking at some resources on the R programming language. This weekend, I decided to install the toolset and see how much effort that took and what the results looked like.

The creator of Bookdown has written a book on how to create books with Bookdown, so I thought I would start there with the Get Started page/section. I downloaded a repo from Github containing a demo book. Next, I downloaded and installed RStudio, which is supposed to be used to create the book. In the process of installation and startup, I found out that I needed to download and install R as well – ooops! Funny how this was not mentioned in the Get Started page….

The next step was to install the bookdown package using the R IDE. However, there was a popup asking if I wanted to set up a separate library. I clicked “No” and tried to install, but got the error message that the R library was not writable. After some searching, I found this Stack Exchange post that addressed this problem…again, interesting that this was not in the book.

Finally, I got the bookdown package installed, opened the demo book, and was able to build the book in HTML form. The console displaying info on the build process showed some errors in generating ePub and PDF versions of the book. The Get Started page indicated that another toolset (TinyTek) was needed for the PDF output. I used the Windows batch file to install Tiny Tek, and went ahead and restarted all the apps (R, RStudio). I then rebuilt the book, it took 1-2 minutes to generate the demo book in PDF form. It had a few pagination problems, but looked ok. Overall, I spent about an hour working through these steps. I will explore it some more, but will also check out Scribus as well. To me, I would have to go through some effort to convert my book draft to R Markdown. If Scribus could create a book with less work, I might head in that direction.

 

 

Inadvertant research of the longevity of Post-It Notes

This past week, I spent several days in the main building of my company, doing some software testing. When I was working in my cubicle (a little over a year ago), I used a whiteboard and Post-It notes to create a kanban board. In my office visit, I saw that none of the Post-It notes had fallen, meaning that the adhesive lasted at least a year – amazing! I decided that the objective of my inadverant test had been met, and removed some of the Post-It notes (the ones in the Done column), with a plan to review and remove the rest of the notes next week. Science in the workplace!