Manuscribble

A docker container prebuilt with pandoc, RStudio, and LaTeX for academic writing.

System Requirements

• Docker
• 4 GB hard drive space

1-step to both install and run

# Navigate to your manuscript directory
# The first time you run this, it'll download a ~4GB docker image
docker run \
    --interactive \
    --tty \
    --rm \
    -v $(pwd):/manuscript \
    danielak/manuscribble:latest \
    your_manuscript_name.Rmd # Replace with your Markdown file

That's it!

Why would I use this?

RStudio is absolutely fantastic and I think everyone should use it. BUT, when I write academic manuscripts, I tend to have the following needs:

1. I need to cite lots of sources
2. I do not want to deal with collaborators using or not having certain LaTeX dependencies.

Manuscribble helps with both problems. Because it's an entirely portable R+LaTeX environment, you can use whatever text editor you want (I'm currently using Github Atom with the LaTeXer package). And, because it contains a full LaTeX install, there's no chance you'll be missing some weird style file dependency.[^1]

[^1]: Unless your collaborators are using some sadistic homegrown style file, in which case: Donald Knuth help you.