Multipage bookdown into article

Question

I'm considering to use Bookdown to write an academic paper. This includes the data processing and analysis code, plus everything else.

I know how to use Bookdown to write books where each .Rmd document creates its own .html page and a book chapter in a LaTeX PDF. I can also see how to use bookdown to write a single .Rmd that becomes a multi-page website and an article-style PDF. At least, that is what I think I see in the bookdown documentation

But what I am trying to figure out is how to have multiple .Rmd files that become a single article-style PDF. I want to have more than one .Rmd to keep the runtime down and my work somewhat organized, but I am not writing a book. It seems as though bookdown is built to turn document breaks into chapters, and I want them to be turned into sections. Am I missing something obvious, or is this going to require a bit of hacking to make it work?

Answer 1

It seems your actual question is how to turn the top-level headers into sections instead of chapters. It depends on the documentclass field in index.Rmd. The default value of this field is article, which means you get sections instead of chapters. Top-level headers are converted to chapters only if the documentclass is for books (e.g., documentclass: book here: https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown-demo/blob/master/index.Rmd#L7).

Then, to render multiple Rmd files to a single PDF, use bookdown::render_book() instead of rmarkdown::render().