R for Data Science

Chapter 23. R Markdown Formats

Introduction

So far you’ve seen R Markdown used to produce HTML documents. This chapter gives a brief overview of some of the many other types of output you can produce with R Markdown. There are two ways to set the output of a document:

1. Permanently, by modifying the the YAML header:

   title: "Viridis Demo"
   output: html_document

2. Transiently, by calling rmarkdown::render() by hand:

   rmarkdown::render(
     "diamond-sizes.Rmd",
     output_format = "word_document"
   )

   This is useful if you want to programmatically produce multiple types of output.

RStudio’s knit button renders a file to the first format listed in its output field. You can render to additional formats by clicking the drop-down menu beside the knit button.

Output Options

Each output format is associated with an R function. You can either write foo or pkg::foo. If you omit pkg, the default is assumed to be rmarkdown. It’s important to know the name of the function that makes the output because that’s where you get help. For example, to figure out what parameters you can set with html_document, look at ?rmarkdown:html_document().

To override the default parameter values, you need to use an expanded output field. For example, if you wanted to render an html_document with a floating table of contents, you’d use:

output:
  html_document:
    toc: true
    toc_float: true

You can even render to ...