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by yihui 3478 days ago
> First of all, this is for statistics based papers, not just "technical papers".

The blog post is not really long, and in the fourth paragraph, I wrote:

> [...] We used books and R primarily for examples in this book, but bookdown is not only for books or R. Most features introduced in this book also apply to other types of publications: journal papers, reports, dissertations, course handouts, study notes, and even novels. You do not have to use R, either. Other choices of computing languages include Python, C, C++, SQL, Bash, Stan, JavaScript, and so on, although R is best supported. You can also leave out computing, for example, to write a novel.

Perhaps one thing I didn't make clear enough is that (you are right that) R (optionally RStudio) should be downloaded to use bookdown locally, but your document or book does not have to be related to R or statistics at all. However, I do agree that people who don't use R probably won't care about downloading R in the first place to use bookdown, so even if bookdown is sort of "general-purpose", the actual major audience is likely to be those doing statistics and data analysis using R.

That said, Sections 5.5 and 6.2 of the bookdown book have shown how to use bookdown on Github and Travis CI: https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/ That way, you don't have to install R locally. All you need to do is to commit changes to Github, and the book can be built automatically on Travis and published to Github pages. The author has to find someone to help him/her set up these services, though.