LoginSign Up
← Back to all sparks
I

INBOmd

ANALYTICS
Velocity0.0

Markdown Templates for INBO

github.com/inbo/inbomd ↗

Institutional report templates where a missing metadata field watermarks the whole document.

report-generationrmarkdownresearch-metadatainbor-package
◆Current state
INBOmd supplies R Markdown output formats — PDF, gitbook, EPUB — carrying the house style and colophon requirements of INBO, the Flemish nature and forest research institute. Its distinguishing design decision is enforcement by embarrassment: an incomplete colophon stamps a watermark across every page until the required fields are filled in. Recent releases are small corrections, with the substantive template work sitting several years back.
◆Where it's heading
The package has settled into maintenance around a stable feature set, with recent activity split between watermark and colophon edge cases and keeping in step with its siblings — it picked up the new citeme dependency within days of checklist splitting that package out. The open work is the long tail of citation rendering across three output formats, where subtitles, colophon fields and DOIs each surface separately. Nothing here suggests new output formats are planned.
◆Prediction
Expect continued small fixes to colophon and citation rendering across the three output formats, and dependency updates tracking the checklist and citeme packages it sits alongside.

◆Recent moves

  1. 1mo ago

    Watermark no longer prints NA when colophon fields are missing

    Fixes the automatic watermark rendering as NA when required colophon fields are absent — the exact case the watermark exists to flag, so the warning was failing at its one job. User-reported. A narrow correction to a feature introduced years earlier.

    View source ↗
  2. 1mo ago

    Dependency bump to the latest citeme and checklist

    Moves to current versions of citeme and checklist, six days after checklist split its citation functions into citeme. A consistency update rather than a change in this package's behaviour, and a clean example of how quickly this family propagates an upstream reorganisation.

    View source ↗
  3. 5mo ago

    Missing subtitle restored in gitbook and EPUB colophon citations

    Fixes the subtitle being dropped from the citation in the colophon for gitbook and EPUB output. One of the recurring per-format citation rendering defects that make up most of this package's recent history.

    View source ↗
  4. 2y ago

    pdf_report() requires pandoc 3.1.8 or later

    Enforces a minimum pandoc version for PDF output and fixes create_report(). A toolchain floor rather than a feature, though it will block users on older pandoc installations until they upgrade.

    View source ↗
  5. 2y ago

    Watermarks and separate colophons for internal reports

    Adds a watermark argument across the output formats and an option for internal reports to carry a different colophon, with an automatic watermark appearing whenever a required colophon field is missing. The automatic case is the interesting design choice: rather than failing the build, it produces a visibly marked document that nobody would circulate. It also formalises the requirement that INBO staff display affiliation and ORCID.

    View source ↗
  6. 3y ago

    Structured author metadata required; interactive report helpers added

    Requires author and reviewer information in an explicit structured format with mandatory name sub-fields, a corresponding-author flag, and optional email and ORCID, breaking existing documents. Adds interactive helpers for creating reports, adding authors, attaching report numbers and validating DOIs. The pairing is deliberate — the metadata requirements tighten and tooling arrives at the same time to make them bearable.

    View source ↗