A pipeline is a process that starts with text, code, and raw data, and ends with the final document or presentation we want to show or distribute. Luckily, much of the hard work is automated for you within R, so there's not much you need to do other than install these tools and set up a compilation file.
Our pipeline should be general enough to accommodate various use cases without having to be modified substantially. If it is, we can master one set of tools and reuse them for different projects rather than learning a new tool set each time. On the input side, using text, code, and data, is general enough. On the output side, being able to generate HTML, PDF, LaTeX, and even Word documents seems to be general enough so we are good to go.
Markdown is a low-overhead mark-up language (http://spec.commonmark.org/0.28/). Its main benefit...