rmarkdown

Notes on R Markdown and Bookdown

Matthew Aldridge

This page consists of various notes I’ve made on R Markdown and Bookdown for creating accessible mathematics lecture notes.

• R Markdown is a method to produce documents using Markdown formatting, including LaTeX-style equations, and which can incorporate R code.
• Bookdown is an extra package for R Markdown which adds extra features useful for long documents, like spliting the document into multiple interlinked webpages and introducing LaTeX-like theorem environments.

My brief introduction to R Markdown and Bookdown

• A brief introduction to RMarkdown and Bookdown This is from summer 2020, and is now a little bit out of date. For example:
  • It is now recommended to use ::: {.theorem} for theorems, whereas this document still recommends the old notation ```{theorem}, which is less good.
  • There is now a fig.alt = ... option to R chunks, which allows you to have a more detailed alt text (alongside the less detailed caption), which this document doesn’t mention.

Teaching development morning, 2021

I’m giving a talk at the teaaching development morning for the School of Mathematics and the University of Leeds on 14 December 2021.

• Slides for my talk
  • R Markdown source code for the above slides
  • Handout for the talk “knitted” from exactly the same code as built the slides themselves [HTML format] or [PDF format]

Notes for students

This year, I have taught our first statistics module MATH1710 Probability and Statistics I, which is also the first place we teach our students about R. As part of the R training in that module I produced a worksheet on R Markdown (HTML format) (Rmd format).

Useful references

• The “bibles”:
  • R Markdown: The Definitive Guide
  • R Markdown Cookbook
  • bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown
• My guide to R Markdown and Bookdown (a bit out of date)
• Serguei Komissarov’s guide to Bookdown
• Cosma Shalizi’s guide to R Markdown

My Bookdown lecture notes

My notes for the University of Leeds module MATH1710 Probability and Statistics I were written in R Markdown with the Bookdown package. (A few R Worksheets at the end are written in “plain” R Markdown without Bookdown.)

• MATH1710 lecture notes
  • Source code for those lecture notes