Introduction

This guide walks through how to create html lecture notes using R, Markdown and Bookdown. This format is preferred as LaTeX doesn’t play nicely with accessibility tools like screen readers, especially for maths heavy content.

System Requirements

To use bookdown, you will need to have R and R studio installed (perhaps R studio is not a requirement, but it makes things a lot easier). These can both be installed from the DDAT Self Service app on a Mac, or R can be downloaded directly from here and R Studio from here. You will also need pandoc. This may already be installed on your system as part of the Anaconda distribution.

The bookdown package can be installed from CRAN or Github:

install.packages("bookdown")
# or the development version
# devtools::install_github("rstudio/bookdown")

Caveat

The instructions in this guide are what worked for me, on a Mac using R version 4.2.1, R Studio version 2023.12.0+369 and pandoc version 3.1.11.1 (updated Jan 2024). This guide also assumes that you’re familiar with using the command line.