Intro

It was time. This is my “Project’s Captain’s Log”. “Day 1” was in fact yesterday. Today was the first day in which I moved from “thinking” to “implementing” the project.

First day, first issues.

Today I focused on setting up the needed “base environment” for me to write more easily my future report (i.e. NOT using MS Word, but rather LaTeX…).

Quarto on Mac M1, MacTex and other issues

It took me the best of two hours today, and I finally felt defeated, and in fact… I gave up. (shame)

All I wanted was to test Quarto, the “new” way for generating reports in RStudio (replacing the more traditional RMarkdown, it would seem).

Long story short, I was never able to get RStudio to use TeX Live 2023 recently installed from the (VERY big) freshly installed MacTeX stuff (8.6GB after installation, 5+GB just to download!) to generate a PDF.

Trying to change pointers in RStudio from xetex to pdflatex wouldn’t work either, and after many (many) attempts, updating R, RStudio, modifying different config files, obviously browsing lots of StackOverflow pages, etc… I was starting to break my env instead of making progress.

And so… I reinstalled, cleaned up a bit, and moved back to my beloved and trustworthy RMarkdown.

(Maybe I should have tried on my container version, that’s Linux, it’s maybe easier than on Mac, who knows… I found I wasn’t the only one to face the specific issue I found, and the other user with the same error apparently never got an answer on the RStudio forum… Oh well.)

Quarto? Maybe some other day.

Adding References to the Report

Another new thing I wanted to make better for myself was to use Pandoc and a .bib file to keep track of references in an orderly fashion, “professional” way as it may be, like others do for “real Papers”.

Indeed, I have used references in the past, but not as a last section automatically generated, instead rather linking directly inline next to the text… Or directly writing hyperlinks. Not “University-worthy”.

That worked like a charm (although now I need to learn more about Citations).

Collecting bits and pieces

A final step to get started was to try and put together some base “code bits”, functions and source files I’ve created in the past, tests and so on, that I could use to get started with the Project.

Done.

Conclusion

First day of actual productive work (i.e. beyond note-taking and thinking), and first day of frustrations…

But also, first day of tangible progress, albeit the current “v0” of the report has 3 sections, 4 pages (including title, table of contents, and plenty of empty white space), correct formatting, some intro text about concepts, and my first “references.bib” file ever.

Not horrible for a first day.