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An R Markdown template for writing lecture notes and academic papers

Motivation

lecturenotes is a personalised .Rmd template that I use for writing my lecture notes and academic papers. It is intended for documents that are going to be exported (i.e. “knitted”) to both HTML and PDF formats. In so doing, it tries to take care of various annoyances and inconsistencies that arise between these two formats. For example:

  • Recognizing the author “affiliation” field in PDF documents.
  • Support for consistent multi-column environments in both HTML and PDF.
  • Consistent regression table output (e.g. threeparttables).
  • Support for non-standard fonts when knitting to PDF.
  • Sensible handling of interactive content depending on the output format.
  • Etc.

You can view samples of the resulting output here:

  1. HTML

  2. PDF

Installation and use

I don’t foresee submitting this bespoke package to CRAN. However, you can easily install it from GitHub:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("grantmcdermott/lecturenotes")

Note that I use several external packages in the template to demonstrate functionality. See the “Suggests” list at the bottom of the DESCRIPTION file. If you want to have these installed automatically, then you can simply amend the above installation command to:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("grantmcdermott/lecturenotes", dependencies = TRUE)

Once the package is installed, open up the lecturenotes template in RStudio by navigating to:

File > New File > R Markdown > From Template > Lecture Notes (lecturenotes)

(You can also select a “lean” template version that just provides the scaffolding without any explanatory text or examples.)

Clicking on the “Knit” button in RStudio will automatically output to both HTML and PDF.

Limitations

This R Markdown template was mostly designed for my own use. As such, it comes with no guarantees; although, please do let me know if you run into problems. Some potential limitations and requirements perhaps worth highlighting:

  • The PDF output has only been tested on a TexLive distribution using XeLaTeX. I cannot guarantee that other LaTeX distributions or engines will work without some tinkering.
  • Similarly, I have adopted some opinionated takes on optimal LaTeX fonts. I use Cochineal as the main font and Fira for the sans and mono fonts. You may need to change or comment out these lines of the template, depending on your own system and/or preferences.
  • The template generally does a good job of automatically handling interactive content depending on the output format. For example, it tries to ignore interactive content when exporting to PDF. One notable exception is rendering of GIFs. I provide an example of how to handle this manually in the template itself.

Acknowledgements

This template essentially pulls together a bunch of tips, tricks, and ideas that I’ve accumulated over time to fit my own idiosyncratic writing and formatting needs. Some of these I stumbled upon on myself, most of them I found the old-fashioned way (i.e. searching on the Internet). Here is a non-exhaustive list of helpful sources that I’ve drawn upon.

License

The material in this repository is made available under the MIT license.