a workflow for slides and papers

Writing academic papers is a pain

• not only do you need a good idea
• you also need to turn that idea into a nice looking product
• it's a bit like sausage making in the sense that little attention is paid to how slides and papers are made
• my focus today is this process
  • most of you probably use either MS Word or LaTeX?
  • I'll try to make the case for a more stripped down text file approach

What do we want?

• academic papers
• nice looking slides to sell our ideas

How do we want them?

• today: primarily pdf
• in the future (but the future is now): also html

If only there were some program that could do all these things…

I think we can do better

• I can write an entire slideshow in the time it takes you to type \documentclass{beamer}, \title{}, etc
• I never remember the commands
• I never understand the error messsages
• … and I think beamer slides are ugly

If only there were ever some simpler program that could give us the same funtionality…

Markdown philosophy

• writing should not be an alienating experience trapped in WYSIWYG editors
• a file should be readable intuitively and not be buried in markup
• markdown is a markup language, but one meant to be read by humans rather than machines

• markdown was created for the web (you know it if you use Github, Stackoverflow, etc.)

Example

Suppose we want to create a nested list

• fruits
  • apples
    • macintosh
    • red delicious
  • pears
  • peaches
• vegetables
  • broccoli
  • chard

Latex

\begin{itemize}      
\item fruits         
    \begin{itemize}       
    \item apples          
        \begin{itemize}     
        \item macintosh     
        \item red delicious 
        \end{itemize}       
    \item pears           
    \item peaches         
    \end{itemize}         
\item vegetables        
    \begin{itemize}       
    \item brocolli        
    \item chard           
    \end{itemize}         
\end{itemize}    

HTML

<ul>
    <li>fruits
    <ul>
        <li>apples
        <ul>
            <li>macintosh</li>
            <li>red delicious</li>
        </ul></li>
        <li>pears</li>
        <li>peaches</li>
    </ul></li>
    <li>vegetables
    <ul>
        <li>brocolli</li>
        <li>chard</li>
    </ul></li>
</ul>                       

Markdown

* fruits
    - apples
        - macintosh
        - red delicious
    - pears 
    - peaches
* vegetables
    - broccoli
    - chard

Some technical stuff…

• customize your stylesheet

  • latex template
  • install proper fonts (minion pro)
  • pandoc templates

• get help here

• my style files are on github

• let's see an example of a real paper (which won't be online until there's a draft ready)

More technical stuff

• html doesn't understand latex tables (and vice versa)
• so we need to be able to typeset
  • markdown tables
  • latex and html tables
• you can include raw html and latex code in your markdown file
  
• can your favorite stats program do that?

Some can…

library(stargazer)
linear.1 <- lm(rating ~ complaints + privileges + learning + raises + critical,
data=attitude)
linear.2 <- lm(rating ~ complaints + privileges + learning, data=attitude)
## create an indicator dependent variable, and run a probit model
attitude$high.rating <- (attitude$rating > 70)
probit.model <- glm(high.rating ~ learning + critical + advance, data=attitude,
family = binomial(link = "probit"))

• it would be even better to output markdown tables
• this is almost possible in R and is a project at GSOC 2014

library(pander)
m <- mtcars[1:5, 1:3]
pandoc.table(m, style = "rmarkdown")

|                    |  mpg  |  cyl  |  disp  |
|:-----------------------:|:-----:|:-----:|:------:|
|      **Mazda RX4**      |  21   |   6   |  160   |
|    **Mazda RX4 Wag**    |  21   |   6   |  160   |
|     **Datsun 710**      | 22.8  |   4   |  108   |
|   **Hornet 4 Drive**    | 21.4  |   6   |  258   |
|  **Hornet Sportabout**  | 18.7  |   8   |  360   |

output