two-column layouts in RStudio presentations/slidify/pandoc

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I'm trying to come up with a good system for generating slides and accompanying handouts. The ideal system would have the following properties:

  • beautiful in both presentation (PDF/HTML) and handout (PDF) layouts (handouts should have room for taking notes)
  • embedded R chunks, figures, other JPG/PNG pictures, etc.
  • easy to compose
  • build using command-line tools
  • bibliography support
  • pandoc slide separator format (automatically generate a new slide after headers of a specified level) is preferred
  • I can live with a little bit of additional processing (e.g. via sed), but would prefer not to write a huge infrastructure
  • two-column layouts: there is a SO post on how to get multi-column slides from pandoc, but it is LaTeX- rather than HTML-oriented.
  • ability to adjust sizes of embedded images (other than R-generated figures) and column widths on the fly

Here's what I've discovered so far about the various options:

  • Slidify:
    • doesn't do pandoc slide separator format, although there is a workaround
    • the suggestion for creating handouts is to print to PDF; I'd like to leave room for notes etc. (I could probably figure out a way to do that using something like PDFtk or psnup ...)
  • RStudio presentations (.Rpres files):
    • does lots of things nicely, including multi-columns with specified widths
    • doesn't support pandoc slide separator format
    • I can't figure out what's going on under the hood. There is RStudio documentation that describes the translation process for regular HTML, but it doesn't seem to cover the R presentation format (which isn't quite the same). (I have previously invested some effort in figuring out how to get RStudio-like output via pandoc ...), which means I can't generate slides etc. from the command line.
  • RStudio's Development Version (as of March 2014) comes bundled with Pandoc and version 2 of rmarkdown. It addresses many of the above issues with the .Rpres format.
  • pandoc: may be the only markdown-translator that has features such as footnotes, bibliography support, etc.. I can also use pandoc to generate LaTeX using the tufte-handout class, which meets my criteria of beauty.
    • Unfortunately, it seems not to have built-in two-column format support. Yihui Xie's HTML5 example doesn't show any two-column examples, and it claims (on slide 5) that clicking the "Knit HTML" button in RStudio is equivalent to pandoc -s -S -i -t dzslides --mathjax knitr-slides.md -o knitr-slides.html, but it doesn't seem to be ...
  • LaTeX/beamer: I could simply compose in Rnw (knitr-dialect Sweave) rather than R markdown to begin with. This would give me ultimate flexibility ...
    • despite many years of LaTeX use I do find LaTeX composition more of a pain than markdown composition.

After all that, my specific question is: what's the best (easiest) way to generate a two-column layout for HTML output?

Any other advice will also be appreciated.

slidify rstudio r-markdown knitr r
7 Answers

You can use fenced_divs notation or ::: to create columns or `Two Content layout'. See also this page to know more about the notation.

## Slide With Image Left

::: columns

:::: column
left
::::

:::: column
right

```{r your-chunk-name, echo=FALSE, fig.cap="your-caption-name"}
knitr::include_graphics("your/figure/path/to/the-image.pdf")

#The figure will appear on the right side of the slide...
```
::::

:::

Since pandoc 2+, which supports the notation, was implemented in RStudio v1.2+, you may need to install RStudio v1.2+ first. The installation is easy enough (at least in my case); just download and install RStudio v1.2+. In the way of installation, the former version of RStudio on your computer will be replaced with the new one without uninstalling it manually.

The ::: notation can be used even when you knit .Rmd files with beamer_presentation option, as well as when you create HTML slides. So we don't have to neither mix markdown and LaTeX notation in one file, nor add additional codes any longer: just knit the file as you knit other .Rmd with other options.

user_102153010

There is a workaround for beamer error.

In short: Error is related to pandoc conversion engine, which treats everything between \begin{...} and \end{...} as TeX. It can be avoided by giving new definition for begin{column} and end{column} in yaml header.

Create mystyle.tex and write there:

\def\begincols{\begin{columns}}
\def\begincol{\begin{column}}
\def\endcol{\end{column}}
\def\endcols{\end{columns}}

In the Rmd file use these new definitions 

---
output:
  beamer_presentation:
    includes:
      in_header: mystyle.tex
---


Two Column Layout 
-------

\begincols
  \begincol{.48\textwidth}

This slide has two columns.

  \endcol
\begincol{.48\textwidth}

```{r}
#No error here i can run any r code
plot(cars)
```

  \endcol
\endcols

And you get: enter image description here

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