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Project technical components overview
The open geomatics textbook will be built using Bookdown. Bookdown is an R package that compiles and publishes nicely formatted, and feature-rich content in a digital textbook layout. The easiest way to work with Bookdown is by using the R IDE, RStudio. There are a few RStudio versions, but for this project, we will need the free RStudio Desktop, which can be downloaded here for Windows and MacOS.
Once you have RStudio running on your computer, you can start using Bookdown by following the Getting Started directions from the official Bookdown Documentation.
A textbook built with Bookdown can be freely and securely hosted in the web with GitHub. Our project will use the main textbook repository in this GitHub Organization as the final published product. In order for us to populate that repository with our authored textbook content, we'll use Git-based version control workflows which integrate very nicely with GitHub. For more information about the project workflows see wiki page Project workflow overview.
We're arranging a 1.5-hour workshop to get up and running with Git and GitHub during the week of May 1, 2021. This workshop is also available here: ubc-library-rc.github.io/intro-git/.
Markdown is a markup language for styling and formatting text, very commonly used in the web for converting plain text to HTML. Content for the textbook will ultimately need to be formatted using RMarkdown for conversion with RStudio and Bookdown, which is a version of Markdown integrated with R syntax. (Actually, you can use regular Markdown with too, but you'll still need to convert with RStudio).
Your workflow for creating Markdown/RMarkdown documents will depend on what you're familiar comfortable with when creating text documents. Some will likely want to create their content in Microsoft Word, then convert to Markdown using a web converter like Word2md. Others might want to export Google Docs using a converter like Docs to Markdown. Some might prefer to generate content in plain text Markdown using a code editor like Atom.io, which has a spell check and markdown preview package which can be installed.