You Only Write Thrice: Creating Documents, Computational Notebooks and Presentations From a Single Source

TL;DR

This paper introduces a workflow that enables the creation of documents, notebooks, and presentations from a single source, streamlining academic content production and version management.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach using open-source tools to generate multiple academic formats from one markdown source within a version-controlled environment.

Findings

Supports change tracking and versioning

Facilitates transparent review process

Integrates multiple output formats from a single source

Abstract

Academic trade requires juggling multiple variants of the same content published in different formats: manuscripts, presentations, posters and computational notebooks. The need to track versions to accommodate for the write--review--rebut--revise life-cycle adds another layer of complexity. We propose to significantly reduce this burden by maintaining a single source document in a version-controlled environment (such as git), adding functionality to generate a collection of output formats popular in academia. To this end, we utilise various open-source tools from the Jupyter scientific computing ecosystem and operationalise selected software engineering concepts. We offer a proof-of-concept workflow that composes Jupyter Book (an online document), Jupyter Notebook (a computational narrative) and reveal.js slides from a single markdown source file. Hosted on GitHub, our approach supports change tracking and versioning, as well as a transparent review process based on the underlying code issue management infrastructure. An exhibit of our workflow can be previewed at https://so-cool.github.io/you-only-write-thrice/.