Error when rendering tufte_html_book() with R/bookdown

Question

I'm trying to build a book with R/bookdown and I'm facing a problem when producing a html version using tufte_html_book or html_book:

Error in split_chapters(output, page_builder, number_sections, split_by,  : 
  The document must start with a first (#) or second level (##) heading

The book is correctly produced in gitbook or tufte_book2 output. The document has four files index.Rmd, 01-Chap1.Rmd, 02-Chap2.Rmd, 03-Chap3.Rmd. I like to keep things clear, so index.Rmd only contains the YAML headers, plus some R code but no heading, which is probably what yields the error. Is there a way to make the html outputs of bookdown behave similarly to gitbook or pdf output?

Here is a small reproducible example:

Index.Rmd:

---
title: "Tufte Handout"
subtitle: "An implementation in R Markdown"
author: "JJ Allaire and Yihui Xie"
date: "`r Sys.Date()`"
site: bookdown::bookdown_site
output:
  bookdown::tufte_html_book:
    toc: yes
bookdown::tufte_book2:
    toc: yes
---

```{r setup1, include=FALSE}
library(tufte)
# invalidate cache when the tufte version changes
knitr::opts_chunk$set(tidy = FALSE, cache.extra = 
packageVersion('tufte'))
options(htmltools.dir.version = FALSE)
```

01-Chap1.Rmd

# Introduction

The Tufte handout style is a style that Edward Tufte uses in his books and handouts. Tufte's style is known for its extensive use of sidenotes, tight integration of graphics with text, and well-set typography. This style has been implemented in LaTeX and HTML/CSS^[See Github repositories [tufte-latex](https://github.com/tufte-latex/tufte-latex) and [tufte-css](https://github.com/edwardtufte/tufte-css)], respectively. We have ported both implementations into the [**tufte** package](https://github.com/rstudio/tufte). If you want LaTeX/PDF output, you may use the `tufte_handout` format for handouts, and `tufte_book` for books. 
For HTML output, use `tufte_html`. These formats can be either specified in the YAML metadata at the beginning of an R Markdown document (see an example below), or passed to the `rmarkdown::render()` function. See @R-rmarkdown more information about **rmarkdown**.

You should give a reproducible example. Maybe you can leave only index.Rmd and 01-Chap1.Rmd, and make their content as less as possible while it can produce the same example. Then paste the code of the two files. — Zhuoer Dong
Is it possible to generate a tufte pdf book using this approach? — lf_araujo

xraynaud xraynaud · Accepted Answer · 2017-10-09T09:58:53

I'm answering my own question.

The difference in behaviour between gitbook and (tufte_)html_book is in the split_by argument, which is split_by="chapter" in gitbook and split_by="section" in (tufte_)html_book. Adding split_by: chapter to the bookdown::tufte_html_book: yaml section allows to build the html without error.

Error when rendering tufte_html_book() with R/bookdown

1 Answers