Open Source R Formats and Protocols

R Markdown Cookbook. A range of tips and tricks to make better use of R Markdown. R Markdown is a powerful tool for combining analysis and reporting into the same document. Since the birth of the rmarkdown package (Allaire, Xie, Dervieux, McPherson, et al. 2023) in early 2014, R Markdown has grown substantially from a package that supports a few output formats, to an extensive and diverse ecosystem that supports the creation of books, blogs, scientific articles, websites, and even resumes.

A lightweight, cross-platform, portable, and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution based on TeX Live. TinyTeX, is a custom LaTeX distribution based on TeX Live that is small in size but still functions well in most cases. Even if you run into the problem of missing LaTeX packages, it should be super clear to you what you need to do. In fact, if you are an R Markdown user, there is nothing you need to do, because missing packages will just be installed automatically. You may not even know the existence of LaTeX at all since it should rarely bother you. Currently, TinyTeX works best for R users. Other users can use it, too—it is just that missing LaTeX packages won’t be automatically installed, and you need to install them manually. Or you can go to the extreme to install all packages, but remember there are thousands of them.

Huxtable is an R package to create LaTeX and HTML tables, with a friendly, modern interface. Features include control over text styling, number format, background color, borders, padding, and alignment. Cells can span multiple rows and/or columns. Tables can be manipulated with standard R subsetting or dplyr functions.

OpenIntro Statistics is a dynamic take on the traditional curriculum, being successfully used at Community Colleges to the Ivy League. Each chapter's content is in one of the eight chapter folders that start with "ch_". Within each folder, there is a "figures" folder and a "TeX" folder. The TeX folder contains the text files that are used to typeset the chapters in the textbook. In many cases, R code is supplied with figures to regenerate the figure. It will often be necessary to install the "openintro" R package that is available from GitHub (https://github.com/OpenIntroOrg) if you would like to regenerate a figure. Other packages may also occasionally be required.

The package bookdownplus (Zhao 2017a) is an extension of R bookdown (Xie 2016). It is a collection of multiple templates on the basis of LaTeX, which is tailored so that I can work happily under the umbrella of bookdown. bookdownplus helps you write academic journal articles, guitar books, chemical equations, mails, calendars, and diaries. bookdown features the collaboration of many fantastic tools. However, an R beginner might be confused or depressed in struggling in the flood of LaTeX, YAML, Markdown, Pandoc, etc. It would be a pity if users stopped their steps at the door and gave up the courage to enter the wonderful world of bookdown. bookdownplus is the easiest shortcut to the world of bookdown. With just one single command users can get a demo book (or multiple demo books) in .pdf or .doc, or even more formats. bookdownplus extends the features of bookdown, and simplifies the procedure.

latex2exp is an R package that lets you use LaTeX in plots. It parses and converts LaTeX to R’s custom plotmath expressions. You can read the full documentation on the package’s website. Expressions returned by latex2exp can be used to create formatted text and mathematical formulas and symbols to be rendered as axis labels, annotations, legends, titles, etc. throughout R’s plotting system.

Query the mathpix API to convert math images to LaTeX.

Paginate the HTML Output of R Markdown with CSS for Print. You only need a modern web browser (e.g., Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge) to generate PDF. No need to install LaTeX to get beautiful PDFs. This R package stands on the shoulders of two giants to support typesetting with CSS for R Markdown documents: Paged.js and ReLaXed (we only borrowed some CSS from the ReLaXed repo and didn't really use the Node package).

Welcome to Posterdown! This is my attempt to provide a semi-smooth workflow for those who wish to take their RMarkdown skills to the conference world. Many creature comforts from RMarkdown are available in this package such as Markdown section notation, figure captioning, and even citations like this one (Allaire, Xie, McPherson, et al. 2018). The rest of this example poster will show how you can insert typical conference poster features into your own document. Posterdown was created as a proof-of-concept (to myself) that it is possible to make a beautiful poster using open-source reproducible code.