Sketch and Draft Course Books from an Outline • rithmatist

The goal of rithmatist is to get a course out of your head and into a Quarto book quickly.

This was developed using claude, specifically to help me with turning my courses into structured books based on a specific outline that I have, using the teaching practices that I tend to use.

I did not develop this for others to use really, so it might not be exactly what you are after.

The name

A Rithmatist draws chalk figures that come alive and act on their behalf. Which is roughly what a scaffolder does — you sketch an outline, and the drawing does the work.

Installation

You can install the development version of rithmatist from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("njtierney/rithmatist")

How it works

Write a schedule as markdown. Each level-two heading is a chapter, and each bullet under it is a section:

# Schedule

## Project Organisation

- Common project structures
- Pitfalls of organisation
- Understanding file paths
- RStudio and positron set up
- "Good Enough"/Common Sense principles of project organisation
- Always have a README

Then draft the book:

library(rithmatist)
draft_book("schedule.md")

Which writes one .qmd per chapter:

#> code-style-and-readability.qmd
#> project-organisation.qmd
#> putting-it-all-together.qmd
#> writing-a-reprex-getting-unstuck.qmd
#> writing-functions.qmd
#> writing-readable-code.qmd

Each chapter arrives with its sections as headings, a duration, and a placeholder exercise per section, ready to be written over:

# Project Organisation

## Overview

* **Duration** 15 minutes

## Questions

## Common project structures

::: {.callout-note title="Your Turn"}

1. TODO: exercise for this section.

:::

Keeping `_quarto.yml` in step

chapters_yaml() prints the chapter list in schedule order, so the book config follows the outline rather than being maintained by hand:

chapters_yaml(schedule)
  chapters:
    - "index.qmd"
    - "project-organisation.qmd"
    - "code-style-and-readability.qmd"
    - "writing-readable-code.qmd"
    - "writing-functions.qmd"
    - "writing-a-reprex-getting-unstuck.qmd"
    - "putting-it-all-together.qmd"

Drafting over time

draft_book() skips chapters that already exist, so re-running it after adding a section to your schedule picks up only what’s new and leaves your written chapters alone. Pass overwrite = TRUE to regenerate from scratch — which discards hand-written content, so it’s for while the structure is still moving.

Customising the exercises

The default exercise is a TODO placeholder in a “Your Turn” callout. Pass any function that returns markdown lines, or NULL for no exercises at all:

cat(
  draft_chapter(
    title = "Writing Functions",
    bullets = "- Anatomy of a function",
    exercise = function() callout("Write a function.", title = "Exercise", type = "tip")
  ),
  sep = "\n"
)
# Writing Functions

## Overview

* **Duration** 15 minutes

## Questions

## Anatomy of a function

::: {.callout-tip title="Exercise"}

Write a function.

:::

rithmatist