Template for R Markdown "beamer" slides

To use this repository

Click Use this template from the GitHub interface. Choose a name for your new repository. You will get a copy of this repository with all the files but none of the commit history.

Required R packages

It is probably helpful to make sure all of your packages are up to date!

At the very least:

• rmarkdown
• knitr
• kableExtra
• magrittr

Steps to get your own talk started.

1. Rename PresentationSlides.Rmd to whatever you want it to be
2. Rename the value of the SLIDES variable in Makefile to match your new Rmd file name.
3. Remove Model.png and the contents of references.bib.
4. Update Makefile to reflect removing Model.png
5. Write your slides!

If you add external images to this repository that will be graphics for slides:

1. Commit them!
2. Add them to the IMAGES variable in Makefile so that your slides rebuild if they change.

Building your presentation

Execute make. If you use a vim-like editor, then execute this command when in normal mode:

:make

Changing the theme

1. Get a new beamer theme, add it to your repository and commit it.
2. Change theme: in the YAML block at the top of your Rmd file.

Converting to another output format

Change output: in the YAML block of the Rmd file. For example, to get a slidy HTML presentation:

output: slidy_presentation

Once you change the output format, the theme: is no longer relevant and can be deleted from the YAML block.

Other things probably change as well:

• You may want to avoid using figure/table captions and cross references. Doing so is probably fine--they're a bit over the top for most presentations.
• Using kable for tables now requires some nuance, as you need to do different things for HTML output, etc..
  The way to do this is to use the functions knitr::is_html_output and knitr::is_latex_output.

To generate both PDF and HTML output, you can make changes like this to the Makefile. First, add an html output file target:

SLIDES:=PresentationSlides.pdf PresentationSlides.html

Then, add a build pattern to convert Rmd to html:

%.html: %.Rmd
	R --no-save --quiet -e "rmarkdown::render('$<', output_format='slidy_presentation')"

Configuring the LaTeX

1. Add your changes to preamble.tex.

Configuring the R environment

1. Make the changes to the r setup block near the top of the Rmd file.

Notes regarding Python

1. If you aren't using Python, remove these two lines:

library(reticulate) # For Python
use_python("/usr/bin/python3", required=T)

2. You may need to configure the path in the use_python command.