TheEffectStyle

Files and tips for modifying the msmbstyle Bookdown style to look like The Effect.

bookdown is an R package for formatting and publishing books. It's great!

You may intend your book to be in the Tufte style, as in tufte-css or tufte-latex. Tufte-style books contain a number of stylistic decisions that imitate the formatting of Edward Tufte, perhaps the most prominent (and difficult to find a template for) being the sidenotes, margin notes, and newthought smallcaps minisection-starters. There are options for doing that in regular bookdown with its Tufte-style outputs.

msmbstyle is an R package that is, as far as I can tell, the only restyling option for bookdown output to a Tufte-style HTML book. It looks good! Certainly much more like you'd expect an HTML book to look than the standard tufte_html_book() output.

I will point out that if your goal is an HTML book and you are ambivalent about the whole sidenote thing, I'd recommend not going for a Tufte-style book. You're going to have way more options, with bigger support teams behind them, using the standard bookdown styles, like bs4_book.

The sidenotes were pretty important to me! But there were several aspects of msmbstyle I wanted to change. This repo contains files and examples that include:

• How to restart the sidenote numbering in each chapter (renumber_sidenotes.html).
• How to move the chapter selection dropdown menu to instead be an always-on sidebar that reverts to the dropdown when the window shrinks, and some other minor fixes (css.css)
• How to add a search bar (see below)
• How to do the tab-selection code chunks like in this section (this one has nothing to do with msmbstyle or Tufte exactly)
• My example YAML from The Effect, which includes the options that extended the section numbering as well as some other things.

The latter two are both in index.RMD. The code for sidenote renumbering and the search bar (except for add_searchbar.R) were written by Atin Gupta who does very good work and who you should patronize if you need any coding done.

How to Add a Search Bar

• Add the jquery.mark.min.js and myscript.php files to the same folder as all the html output documents for your book.
• Modify line 10 of myquery.js to point to the URL of your book rather than to theeffectbook.net, and then put that in the same folder with all your html output documents
• Modify lines 6 and (possibly, if you've changed the default bookdown settings) 4 of add_searchbar.R to reflect the folder name in which your html output documents are, and the full title of your book.
• Each time you render your book, run add_searchbar.R afterwards to add the search bar code in the appropriate locations in your html output files

The search bar will only work on a live server. The bar will show up but search won't function properly if it's running on your local machine.

If you happen to know how to modify this code so it will jump to the section or first text presence on a page rather than just the chapter, please do and let me know!

Disclaimers:

Maybe all this stuff will work for non-msmbstyle tufte_html_book() output from bookdown? I dunno. You can try!

I hope you find these materials helpful, and hope they solve whatever problem you have. I am not interested in helping you troubleshoot your particular book. Sorry! No time, I'm not really that much of a bookdown/rmarkdown expert anyway, and also troubleshooting someone else's bookdown is a real drag. I'd much rather help people troubleshoot their causal inference problems, which I already do plenty of. My dues are paid.

I have not tried bookdown for tufte-latex (the published version of The Effect was written directly in LaTeX, not bookdown). This repo has nothing to do with LaTeX output.