Evaluating Citation and Footnotes about trackdown HOT 2 OPEN

Hi and thank you for taking the time to consider this feature! :) As it is mainly an issue of readability, I do not think that placing a tag instead of showing the rmarkdown-syntax would help.

In my particular use case, my collaborator is familiar with rmarkdown, so they would have no problem understanding the citations / footnote syntax. Instead, it really is a case of not having a smooth reading experience with non-evaluated citations / footnotes and thus providing feedback becomes more burdensome if you have to have two files open simultaneously, one to read and one to comment.

Maybe this is a style-thing, but although I write all my papers in rmarkdown, I always perform the "check of how does it read" in an evaluated/knitted version (e.g., pdf or word), and not in the rmarkdown file itself.

So, if it wouldn't make too much trouble to evaluate citations and footnotes, that would surely improve the experience I personally have with trackdown and the chances that I get collaborators to cooperate ;-)

from trackdown.

Hi @CaroZygar,

Sorry for the late reply.

I have tried to figure out how Rmarkdown manages citations and footnotes. I was hoping for some kind of already available functions to evaluate citations and footnotes separately from the whole document. Actually, everything is managed by Pandoc.

To my understanding (that I admit is pretty limited, as each time I dig into rmarkdown/knitr source code I end up with little more than a huge headache😅; I really admire the complexity of these packages), there is no shortcut for evaluating citations and footnotes other than using Pandoc. Now, Pandoc is a little bit too far for me. I have very limited experience using Pandoc directly. Moreover, managing citations is quite complex (many options, settings and possible scenarios). On top of this, there would still be the problem of how to manage backward evaluation to restore the original document.

At the moment, I do not see any easy solutions to evaluate citations and footnotes without evaluating the whole document. For the reasons discussed in the previous comment (link), the idea beyond trackdown is to not evaluate the document to keep the workflow as simple as possible. Instead, to enhance readability, we can hide/restore code chunks and other parts. As you pointed out, however, placing a tag instead of showing the rmarkdown-syntax would not help in the case of citations and footnotes (apart from avoiding other collaborators inadvertently editing the code).

Unfortunately, I can't think of other solutions. I will leave the issue open. Maybe, someone will find a possible solution in the future.

from trackdown.