Knitting RMarkdown documents in RStudio
Helena RascheOne of the other nice features of RMarkdown documents is making lovely presentation-quality worthy documents. You can take, for example, a tutorial and produce a nice report like output as HTML, PDF, or .doc document that can easily be shared with colleagues or students.
Now you’re ready to preview the document:
Click Preview. A window will popup with a preview of the rendered verison of this document.
The preview is really similar to the GTN rendering, no cells have been executed, and no output is embedded yet in the preview document. But if you have run cells (e.g. the first few loading a library and previewing the msleep dataset:
When you’re ready to distribute the document, you can instead use the Knit button. This runs every cell in the entire document fresh, and then compiles the outputs together with the rendered markdown to produce a nice result file as HTML, PDF, or Word document.
tip Tip: PDF + Word require a LaTeX installation
You might need to install additional packages to compile the PDF and Word document versions
And at the end you can see a pretty document rendered with all of the output of every step along the way. This is a fantastic way to e.g. distribute read-only lesson materials to students, if you feel they might struggle with using an RMarkdown document, or just want to read the output without doing it themselves.
