Quarto reveal.js clean

A minimalist and elegant presentation theme

Grant McDermott

Amazon.com

Kyle Butts

UC Boulder

May 19, 2024

Example slide

This is a subtitle

Before we dive a bit deeper, here is a simple example of the clean theme in action.

  • No pictures or anything fancy. Just text for the moment.

Next, we’ll take a brief tour of some theme components.

  • We’ll use the same basic structure as the original LaTeX slides.
  • Note that the full suite of Reveal.js features are available for this Quarto implementation, even if we don’t cover everything here.

Before you proceed…

Requirements for the coding examples in this demo

The clean theme is language agnostic. Use it with R, Python, Julia, etc. Or none of the above.

However, this demo uses R code to highlight advanced theme features. You’ll need to install some software if you’d like to render the demo “as-is”.

Required software (this demo only)

R packages

install.packages(c("modelsummary", "fixest", "pdftools", "tinytex", "threejs"))

TinyTex

quarto install tinytex

While reveal.js presentations are HTML format, we will show an example of how to embed LaTeX tables as images. This requires a working Tex distribution, of which TinyTex provides by far the easiest and lightest integration with Quarto. More details here.

Components

Components

Ordered and Unordered Lists

Here we have an unordered list.

  • first item
    • sub-item
  • second item

And next we have an ordered one.

  1. first item
    1. sub-item
  2. second item

Components

Alerts & Cross-refs

To emphasize specific words or text, you can:

  • Use the default .alert class, e.g. important note.
  • Use the .fg class for custom colour, e.g. important note.
  • Use the .bg class for custom background, e.g. important note.

To cross-reference, you have several options, for example:

  • Beamer-like .button class provided by this theme, e.g. Appendix
  • Quarto’s native cross-ref syntax, e.g., “See Section 5.3.”

Components

Citations

Citations follow the standard Quarto format and be sourced from BibLaTex, BibTeX, or CLS files. For example:

Components

Blocks

Quarto provides dedicated environments for theorems, lemmas, and so forth.

But in presentation format, it’s arguably more effective just to use a Callout Block.

Regression Specification

The main specification is as follows:

\[ y_{it} = X_{it} \beta + \mu_i + \varepsilon_{it} \]

Components

Multicolumn I: Text only

Column 1

Here is a long sentence that will wrap onto the next line as it hits the column width, and continue this way until it stops.

Column 2

Some other text in another column.

A second paragraph.

Multicolumn support is very flexible and we can continue with a single full span column in the same slide.

Components

Multicolumn II: Text and figures

  • A point about the figure that is potentially important.
  • Another point about the figure that is also potentially important.

Note that sub- and multi-panel figures are also natively supported by Quarto. See here.

Components

Multicolumn III: Code and output

palette("Classic Tableau")

par(
  family = "HersheySans",
  las = 1, pch = 19, cex = 1.5
)

pairs(
  iris[,1:4],
  col=iris$Species
)
Figure 1: Pairwise scatterplot

Tables

Markdown tables

Default table styling

The clean theme rolls its own minimalist aesthetic for tables. This should interface directly with Quarto’s excellent table support.

| fruit  | price  |
|--------|-------:|
| apple  | 2.05   |
| pear   | 1.37   |
| orange | 3.09   |

: Fruit prices {tbl-colwidths="[75,25]"}
Fruit prices
fruit price
apple 2.05
pear 1.37
orange 3.09

Regression tables

Regression example

These aesthetics should carry over to any computation-based tables too.

Let’s take a few slides to illustrate via a simple regression example:

library(fixest)

mods = feols(
  rating ~ complaints + privileges + learning + csw0(raises + critical),
  data = attitude
)

dict = c("rating"     = "Overall Rating",
         "complaints" = "Handling of Complaints",
         "privileges" = "No Special Priviledges",
         "learning"   = "Opportunity to Learn",
         "raises"     = "Performance-Based Raises",
         "critical"   = "Too Critical")

Regression tables

modelsummary

Popular regression table software should play nicely with this theme out of the box. Here’s an example using modelsummary (with the default tinytable backend1). See the next slide for the resulting table.

library(modelsummary) # Make sure you have >=v2.0.0

modelsummary(
  setNames(mods, c("(1)", "(2)")),
  coef_map = dict, stars = TRUE,
  gof_map = NA
  ) |>
  # some optional stylistic tweaks
  tinytable::group_tt(j = list("Dep. variable: Overall Rating" = 2:3)) |>
  tinytable::style_tt(i = 1:2, j = 2:3, background = "pink")

Regression tables

tinytable_ey0ckupsvty3mm228lv2
Dep. variable: Overall Rating
(1) (2)
+ p < 0.1, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001
Handling of Complaints 0.682*** 0.692***
(0.129) (0.149)
No Special Priviledges -0.103 -0.104
(0.129) (0.135)
Opportunity to Learn 0.238+ 0.249
(0.139) (0.160)
Performance-Based Raises -0.033
(0.202)
Too Critical 0.015
(0.147)

Regression tables

fixest::etable

Aside: We used the fantastic fixest package to estimate our regression models. fixest bundles its own powerful tabling functions. These were designed for LaTeX output, but can work with this (HTML) theme too.1

  • Set the output: asis R chunk option in your Quarto doc.
  • Set the markdown = TRUE fixest::etable option.
```{r}
#| output: asis

setFixest_etable(markdown = TRUE, drop = "Constant")
setFixest_dict(dict)

etable(mods, highlight = .("se" = "complaints"))
```

Regression tables

fixest::etable (cont.)

Figures

Figure

Figure

Full-size Figures

You can use the {.background-image} container environment to completely fill the slide background with an image.

Ideally, your figure will be the same aspect ratio as the screen that you’re presenting on.

  • This can be a bit tricky because of the dynamic nature of reveal.js / HTML. But it’s probably something close to 16:9.
  • Aspect ratio can also matter for a regular full-frame images (previous slide).

Interactive plots

Note: Simple flight data example using threejs. There are many interactive plotting options beyond this. (More details.)

Other

Other

What else can the clean theme do?

We have highlighted some theme-specific components in this demo.

But please note that all of the standard reveal.js functionality and plugins are compatible with the clean theme. This includes:

  • chalkboard for annotating slides.
  • multiplex for enabling audience navigation of your slides.
  • pdf printing in case you don’t have access to a web browser.
  • Etc.

Summary

Summary

A minimalist and elegant presentation theme

The Quarto reveal.js clean theme aims to be a minimalist and elegant presention theme. Here are some options to get you started.

Add the theme to an existing project.

quarto install extension grantmcdermott/quarto-revealjs-clean

… or, create a new project using our lean template.

quarto use template grantmcdermott/quarto-revealjs-clean

… or, create a new project using these demo slides as a full template.

quarto use template grantmcdermott/quarto-revealjs-clean-demo

References

Fajgelbaum, Pablo D, Eduardo Morales, Juan Carlos Suarez Serrato, and Owen Zidar. 2018. “State Taxes and Spatial Misallocation,” 90.
Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Enrico Moretti. 2019. “Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation.” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 11 (2): 39.
Moretti, Enrico. 2011. “Local Labor Markets.” In Handbook of Labor Economics. Vol. 4. Elsevier.
Suárez Serrato, Juan Carlos, and Owen Zidar. 2016. “Who Benefits from State Corporate Tax Cuts? A Local Labor Markets Approach with Heterogeneous Firms.” American Economic Review 106 (9).

Appendix

Table 1: Summary of the base R attitude dataset
tinytable_m7xqo9hzpuq3i1iig840
Unique Missing Pct. Mean SD Min Median Max Histogram
rating 22 0 64.6 12.2 40.0 65.5 85.0
complaints 23 0 66.6 13.3 37.0 65.0 90.0
privileges 24 0 53.1 12.2 30.0 51.5 83.0
learning 23 0 56.4 11.7 34.0 56.5 75.0
raises 21 0 64.6 10.4 43.0 63.5 88.0
critical 21 0 74.8 9.9 49.0 77.5 92.0
advance 20 0 42.9 10.3 25.0 41.0 72.0

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