tint

Tint is not Tufte

Motivation

The (html and pdf) styles provided by the tufte package make it very easy and convenient to create documents in the celebrated style of Edward Tufte.

The clear layout, focused use of white space and unparallel use of the margin for complementary information, including graphs, offer a novel and very valuable resource for typsetting.

Yet at the same time, not everybody is a fan of the yellow tint, and the fonts. I had been looking for a while for an alternative, and somewhat recently came across envisioned css by Jef Lippiat. It gets a few things very right: use of the beautiful Roboto font along with a closer-to-white background. So I mixed this with the code framework provided by JJ and Yihui to make it an RMarkdown template you can use just by installing this package. Among the small changes I made were the removal of italics in subheaders and the title.

Similarly, LaTeX styles exists and the tufte supports both pdf handouts and a book format. Here, we also support the pdf handout output.

Example

A quick screenshot of the html variant is below:

and the full underlying document is available too. Its sources are included in the packages as skeleton.Rmd.

Status

The package is now on CRAN and supports both pdf and html output.

Usage

Install from CRAN as any other package, e.g. via

R> install.packages("tint")

and the use e.g. as a Markdown template via RStudio, or call rmarkdown::render() directly.

Requirements

Beyond the R package dependencies a working pandoc binary is needed. RStudio installs its own copy, otherwise do what is needed on your OS (i.e. something like sudo apt-get install pandoc pandoc-citeproc).

The pdf mode requires a fairly complete LaTeX installation. On Debian/Ubuntu, the following packages should provide working set:

texlive-base
texlive-binaries
texlive-fonts-extra
texlive-fonts-recommended
texlive-generic-recommended
texlive-humanities
texlive-latex-base
texlive-latex-extra
texlive-latex-recommended
texlive-pictures

Author

Dirk Eddelbuettel, borrowing heavily from JJ and Yihui in tufte, Dave Liepman in the underlying tufte-css, Jef Lippiat in envisioned css and also elying on the work of the Tufte-LaTeX authors.

License

GPL-3 for my parts and the code from tufte, mostly MIT for what comes from Dave Liepman and Jef Lippiat.