I am using Rmarkdown (notebook) in Rstudio to generate tables and charts, using about 10 code chunks. The R code is running fine. When I knitr to MS-Word (.docx), the results look pretty good, but in some cases I would like to force a page break to improve the appearance, and sometimes to prevent a table from being split across pages (I am using 'flextable' package to create the tables). I tried the ##### page break approach, which involves creating a Word template file and changing the Header 5 properties, but that did not work. I also notice the following post from 7 years ago, which uses a simple Lua filter to allow page breaks in Word. I admit I have not tried that yet. The question is, is there an updated / easier way to control page breaks when outputting to Word in RMarkdown ? It's such a basic part of document control I am surprised how complicated the solutions are (at least based on the older posts).
Pandoc markdown page break
Any suggestions are welcome.
I just got done reading the Django docs on internationalization and something is bugging me.
It seems like the default language strings are themselves used as the keys for retrieving translations. That's perfectly fine for short text, but for paragraphs, it seems like poor design. Now, whenever I change the English (default) text, my keys change and I need to manually update my .po file?
It seems like using keys like "INTRO_TEXT" and retrieving the default language from it's own .po file is the right approach. How have others approached this problem and what has worked well for you?
Yes, you will have to manually update the PO files, but most of the times it will be limited to remove the fuzzy marks on out-of-date translations (gettext marks translations as fuzzy when the original version is modified).
I personally prefer this approach as it keeps the text content in the source code which makes it much more readable (especially for HTML). I also find it hard to find good and concise string identifiers, poorly named identifiers are headache prone.
Django-rosetta will be of great help if you do not want to edit PO files by hand or want to delegate translations to non developers.
How do you make a list double spaced and continue the number? For example
This
Shouldn't
Be
Hard
If I add a line break then the numbering restarts from 1 again. Is there a way to make a whole numbered list double spaced or at least manually add some line breaks without resetting the count?
What is the point of wiki markup, why not just use HTML? It's at least as simple, if not more.
This works for me with Trac-1.0.1:
1. This [[BR]][[BR]]
1. Shouldn't [[BR]][[BR]]
1. Be [[BR]][[BR]]
1. Hard
I think it's because wiki markup is platform-, browser- and version-independent.
Complementing falkb's valuable answer on the first two of your three questions here are some words on Wiki markup:
I strongly disagree on your notion ('why not just use HTML?'), even more after being switched forcefully from Trac to a MS SharePoint business application. Me personal experience is:
Wiki markup is
simpler (and rather figurative/intuitive)
allows higher typing rate
easiler reviewable
faster to copy-n-paste and adapt
compared to equivalent HTML markup.
Most often used features like headings and list markup are a good example - very few extra characters in Wiki, just one additional char to add/remove for making a 2nd level a 3rd level heading. After I got a grip on Trac wiki markup syntax I started making plaintext notes outside of Trac's wiki editor in the same style too for clear text structur with minimal effort.
I have a fairly extensive wiki on ZWiki on Zope (in turn on Plone). Most pages are in reStructured text format, but there are several in straight HTML as well.
What is the best approach to migrate those pages over to a MediaWiki wiki with pages converted to MediaWiki and HTML formats? Of course I'd like to automagically convert all links (internal and external).
extract your wiki content to files, using the zwikiexport.py script. The command will be something like:
ZOPE/bin/zopectl run ZOPE/Products/ZWiki/bin/zwikiexport.py /zodb/path/to/wiki/folder
convert the restructured text markup to mediawiki markup. pandoc should work well - for each wiki page, run something like:
pandoc -r rst -w mediawiki PAGE.rst >PAGE.mw
convert the wiki links, which pandoc doesn't know about. Depending on your content, this may be the hardest part to do accurately. Write a perl script, or modify the zwikiexport script, using Zwiki's knowledge of where the links are (see methods in ZWikiPage.py).
import the mediawiki-format pages into mediawiki, however that's done
refinements:
the exported file tree will reflect your zwiki page hierarchy - if you use this heavily, you'll want to think about how to represent it in mediawiki
as Mark says, you'll lose the page history, unless you work extra hard to find a way to replicate that. The same goes for all page metadata you may have have been using (you can inspect most of this metadata in the page's Properties tab in the zope management interface). In particular the page creation time, last edit time, and the usernames of the page's creator and last editor are quite important, to understand your content. So I would try to script some way of preserving those or if all else fails, doing it by hand.
if you have uploaded files to the wiki, I think the export script might save those too, otherwise use the ZMI to export/save them. When you import them to mediawiki, you may need to choose a page to attach them to. You could use grep or Zwiki's search to find the pages that reference a particular file.
be prepared to iterate, testing the results pretty thoroughly and refining the process, before you declare victory. After that, the content will diverge and you won't want to re-do this.
manual fixups: at some point, it may be cheaper to stop fiddling with scripts and do the remaining cleanup by hand, by yourself or with an army of helpers.
Good luck! - Simon
http://zwiki.org
I've no experience of ZWiki and don't know how large your wiki is. But general advice - you can use find / replace in Notepad or Notepad++ - or you can write a macro in Excel.
This is per page copying which is only really suitable if your wiki is not larger than, say, 1000 pages.
I suspect you'll still have manually to check each page though, and update your scripts accordingly.
Good luck with it - I suspect you'll be pleased with the final result because MediaWiki is pretty awesome.
Update: one disadvantage of moving to a new wiki is that you will lose the page history (i.e. who wrote what, when).
I have a book project which I'd like to start sooner than later. This would follow an agile-like publishing workflow, i.e: publish early and often. It is meant to be self-publsihed by me and I'm not really looking to paper-publish it, even though we never know.
If I weren't a geek, I'd probably have already started writting in Word or any other WYSIWYG tool and just export to PDF. However, we know it is not the best solution, and emacs rules my text-editing life, so, the output format should be as simple as possible and be text-based.
I've thought about the following options:
Just use orgmode and export to PDF (orgmode has this feature natively)
Use markdown mode and export to PDF (markdown->LaTeX->PDF should not be hard to setup);
Use something similar to what the guys # Pragmatic Progammers do: A XML + XSLT + LaTeX.
More complex, but much more control over the style.
EDIT: Someone just told me that he uses a combo of Textile+Adobe In Design and the XTags plugin. Not sure how they are glued together though, gotta do some research.
Any other ideas / references ?
I want to start writting as soon as possible. In fact, I already have a draft in an org-formatted file. However, I do want to have and use the full power of LaTex later on to format it the way I want and make it look fabulous :)
Thanks in advance,
Marcelo.
I have done a TON of research on this lately, since I'm planning on starting my own small press soon.
It really depends on what you want your final output to be (PDF, HTML, other?), and what the book is about.
Org mode is great, as I'm sure you know, because it expands as you do. I often write my outlines in org mode, then just fill in the body text when I'm really ready to start writing.
IF it's prose, and you just need some simple divisions (chapters and sections and not much else), org mode -> latex should do you just fine. Then you also have the possibility of org mode -> html
IF you need math in it, you can just write the math right in the org mode file.
If it's really really technical information, docbook might be nice (emacs + nxml), then dockbook 4.5 -> jade -> jadetex -> pdf.
I'd stay away from docbook 5, because it uses FOP to generate PDFs, and the typesetting is really inferior to latex.
BOTTOM LINE: If you want a PDF, use org -> latex, the path of least resistance ;) -- whatever you do, concentrate on the content of the book first, and worry about what it looks like til after.
And why not paper publish? Have you looked at lulu.com? I recently formatted a book with latex, uploaded the pdf to lulu, and had them print it. The quality is pretty good, and definitely worth a look. I have a ton of bookmarks at home about publishing in general, if you're interested.
Typography is hard.
TeX/LaTeX are tools that can get you the best possible results, however they require knowledge about typography to be used correctly--especially with a big document like a book. And I haven't seen any other cheap (=not for professional use) software that would do things correctly automatically. (I haven't seen any professional software, so it is possible they don't do that either)
However, assuming that you'll write your book in some machine-readable format, putting it into TeX/LaTeX should not be very hard: once I had a set of documents in a custom XML format. Proper usage of XSLT, TeXML and LaTeX gave me something I could tweak manually (and this tweaking was necessary!) and get the best possible result.
My advice: prepare content in something that is easy to parse and easy to write in. I'd dismiss XML. Markdown seems to be good choice. This will also allow you to quickly show your work. Then if you decide to make the result better, write some simple script to translate that to TeX (it is not that hard to get basic functionality) and fix things by hand. This might actually be a good exercise to learn TeX.
Don't try to get everything right from the beginning. Firstly get the content, then play with formatting.
If you are really wanting to do online only, I would suggest you use org mode and just stay in HTML. Then you can use CSS to style it however you would like.
That being said, if you really want to output to PDF for technical stuff, I would strongly suggest using Docbook (www.docbook.org). It's made for that, it works great with Emacs.
You have already answered yourself. Not mentioning that you already started writing in org-mode. Org-mode is really extremely powerful and will enable you to publish to PDF and HTML eventually with no effort.
In case of PDF you can take advantage of LaTeX and how org-mode is working with exports. You can include any LaTeX code to your org file. Also IMHO it's way better to write the book/article in org-mode since something becomes even easier than in plain .tex files take for example tables.
Regarding Publishing it's a same story with one single function you can trigger exporting to HTML/PDF and uploading to your server. And notice that you are still using just plain text file which is human readable and very clean.
Org-mode really follows the Emacs philosphy just start using it and it will grow with you.
If you are writing a book, it would certainly be worth the overhead of learning tex.
Even something like,
\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{book}
\title{SERPA'S BOOK}
\author{SERPA}
\date{\today}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\tableofcontents
\include{chapterA}
\include{chapterB}
\include{chapterC}
\end{document}
Then, in the same directory have files chapterA.tex, chapterB.tex, chapterC.tex that look like
\chapter{My chapter title}
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit....
That alone will produce an extremely nice looking document. You can edit each chapter separately and then just compile the main tex file. I think if you try to learn intermediate tools that try to abstract away from tex, you'll only make it more difficult later to do what you actually want, because you will be both fighting tex and an abstraction of tex at the same time.
Best of luck on such an undertaking.
Also, no matter what you do, make sure to use some kind of version control system, such as SVN, to manage your files. It will be worth it.
I would write it in Latex and have an online repository that does nightly compiles to PDF of the 'publish-ready' branch, available to readers.
I would not start with using LaTeX these days. TeX input is unstructured and the only thing you can get out of TeX input is PDF. If you need HTML or anything else, you are screwed.
Use something structured, such as XML (DocBook is a good suggestion) or define your own XML subset as you need it. Use XSLT to transform it into something usable (HTML etc.) That way you are set for the future.
Depending on your typographical needs, you can then use TeX as a backend processor, or XSLT or whatever.
Also, have a look at ConTeXt, it can read XML directly and has great typography!