For a few years, I think I have to start writing my HDR thesis. At the beginning, I had in mind to use Pandoc and that’s why I started to develop pandoc-df-thesis because relying only on Pandoc did not completely correspond to my expectations. But in the meantime, I also started to use Rstudio and, above all, Rmarkdown. I started to use Rmarkdown and some of its extension (revealjs, bookdown, etc.) for most of my documents productions. So I started to use Rmarkdown and some of its extensions (e.g. revealjs, bookdown, etc.) for most of my document productions (e.g. presentations, course materials, academic articles…). That’s why, when I thought about writing (seriously) my HDR thesis, naturally I moved on to bookdown.
Bookdown introduces some additional functionality on top of Rmarkdown that makes it particularly useful for writing a thesis. You can automatically handle all the numbering of your sections, figures, and tables (like with LaTeX), as well as automatically generating dynamic contents from external data (e.g. bib, csv, xslx, etc.). Thanks to Pandoc, you can also export in various formats, such as pdf , HTML (e.g. gitbook), MS Word , etc.
So from here, I can focus on the writing of my HDR thesis 😄 …