Creating Pretty Documents From R Markdown
Have you ever tried to find a lightweight yet nice theme for the R Markdown
documents, like this page?
Themes for R Markdown
With the powerful rmarkdown package, we could easily create nice HTML document by adding some meta information in the header, for example
---
title: Nineteen Years Later
author: Harry Potter
date: July 31, 2016
output:
rmarkdown::html_document:
theme: lumen
---
The html_document engine uses the Bootswatch theme library to support different styles of the document. This is a quick and easy way to tune the appearance of your document, yet with the price of a large file size (> 700KB) since the whole Bootstrap library needs to be packed in.
For package vignettes, we can use the
html_vignette
engine to generate a more lightweight HTML file that is meant to minimize the
package size, but the output HTML is less stylish than the html_document
ones.
So can we do BOTH, a lightweight yet nice-looking theme for R Markdown?
The prettydoc Engine
The answer is YES! (At least towards that direction)
The prettydoc package provides an alternative engine, html_pretty
,
to knit your R Markdown document into pretty HTML pages.
Its usage is extremely easy: simply replace the
rmarkdown::html_document
or rmarkdown::html_vignette
output engine by
prettydoc::html_pretty
in your R Markdown header, and use one of the built-in
themes and syntax highlighters. For example
---
title: Nineteen Years Later
author: Harry Potter
date: July 31, 2016
output:
prettydoc::html_pretty:
theme: cayman
highlight: github
---
You can also create documents from prettydoc templates in RStudio.
Step 1: Click the "New File" button and choose "R Markdown".
Step 2: In the "From Template" tab, choose one of the built-in templates.
Options and Themes
The options for the html_pretty
engine are mostly compatible with the default
html_document
(see the documentation)
with a few exceptions:
- Currently the
theme
option can take the following values. More themes will
be added in the future.
- cayman
: Modified from the Cayman theme.
- tactile
: Modified from the Tactile theme.
- architect
: Modified from the Architect theme.
- leonids
: Modified from the Leonids theme.
- hpstr
: Modified from the HPSTR theme.
2. The highlight
option takes value from github
and vignette
.
3. Options code_folding
, code_download
and toc_float
are not applicable.
Related Projects
- tufte provides the Tufte style for
R Markdown documents.
provides standard formatting styles for Bioconductor PDF and HTML documents.
- rmdformats by Julien Barnier contains
HTML formats and templates for R Markdown documents, with some extra features such as automatic table of contents, lightboxed figures, and dynamic crosstab helper.
- markdowntemplates by Bob Rudis
is a collection of alternative R Markdown templates.
- prettyjekyll by Florian Privé
uses prettydoc to convert R Markdown documents to Jekyll Markdown for blog posting.
Gallery
Here are some screenshots of the HTML pages generated by prettydoc with different themes and syntax highlighters.