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This page shows you all the instructions on how to contribute to Vistat. Before you get started, you need to fork the supstat/vistat repository to your own Github account (click the Fork button). You are assumed to have basic knowledge of GIT and R.
To start a new article, run
{% highlight bash %} rake post title="A Title" {% endhighlight %}
and you will get an R Markdown (Rmd) file under _source/ named yyyy-mm-dd-a-title.Rmd, which is a plain text file and you can edit it with your favorite text editor. At the moment, RStudio has the best support to Rmd files. Here is an Rmd sample file and its output.
If you do not have or understand rake, just copy an existing Rmd file, rename it and open with a text editor.
There are a few fields in the header such as author and tags; if you have multiple entries, use the comma to separate them, e.g. author: [taiyun, yihui]. Note all authors need to put their information in _config.yml, and input the author id's to the author field (the same applies to reviewers).
You can write math in the LaTeX syntax, e.g. $\alpha+\beta$ renders inline like $$f(x)=\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\pi}}e^{-x^2/2}$$ renders the display style
If you want to generate animations, set animation: true in the preamble of the article and use the chunk option fig.show='animate' in the chunk header. Similarly, d3: true will load D3 in the page.
The executable script _bin/knit is essentially an R script. For Linux/Mac users, you can compile an Rmd file to md by
{% highlight bash %} ./_bin/knit _source/yyyy-mm-dd-your-post.Rmd {% endhighlight %}
For Windows users, use Rscript instead:
{% highlight bash %} Rscript ./_bin/knit _source/yyyy-mm-dd-your-post.Rmd {% endhighlight %}
You can certainly compile the article inside your editor like RStudio, and the above approach is only necessary if you need animations to work.
If you want to preview your article in the website, you can run
{% highlight bash %} rake preview {% endhighlight %}
which is basically a wapper to jekyll --server --auto. Of course you need to install Jekyll first.
After you are done with an article, commit it to your forked repository and submit a pull request to us. We will get it reviewed and you will see comments online. Further revisions may be required, in which case you just make the revision and continue commit in the changes, and they will appear in the previous pull request.
Please commit the source file only (*.Rmd) and do not commit the output files (*.md and figures). We will re-compile the source files and upload images after we accept the article. Therefore if your article involves with special packages or data, you should add clear instructions on them in the article.
Everyone is welcome to become a reviewer for Vistat. Reviews are public on Github.