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renderthis

This package contains functions for rendering R Markdown and Quarto documents — priamrily xaringan or revealjs slides — to different formats, including HTML, PDF, PNG, GIF, PPTX, and MP4, as well as a ‘social’ output, a png of the first slide re-sized for sharing on social media.

Looking for xaringanBuilder? The renderthis package was previously called xaringanBuilder. We updated the name as the package evolved (see this blog post detailing the package’s history) If you need to install xaringanBuilder under the previous package name, see the instructions below.

Installation

Note: To get the most out of renderthis, we recommend installing the package with dependencies and making sure that you have a local installation of Google Chrome. See the Setup page for details.

Since renderthis is temporarily not on CRAN (we’ll eventually get it back up), you can install it from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("jhelvy/renderthis")

Some output formats require additional packages, and each format will provide instructions about how to install any missing dependencies. You can also choose to install renderthis with all of its dependencies:

# From GitHub
pak::pak("jhelvy/renderthis", dependencies = TRUE)

Usage

Use renderthis to render slides to different formats. Here is a diagram of the render hierarchy:

Rmd / qmd
 |
 |--> social (png, from Rmd only)
 |
 |--> html
       |
       |--> pdf
             |
             |--> png
                   |
                   |--> gif
                   |
                   |--> mp4
                   |
                   |--> pptx

To use renderthis, first load the package:

All of the package functions follow a common pattern:

  • All functions start with to_*() to render slides to a desired format (e.g., to_pdf()).
  • All functions have a required from argument which should be set to the full or local path to the input file.
  • All functions have an optional to argument. If provided, it can be a full or local path to the output file, and it must end in an appropriate extension (e.g. slides.gif for to_gif()). If it is not provided, the output file name will be determined based on the from argument.

Learn more about renderthis in the Get Started article.

Author and License Information

Citation Information

If you use this package in a publication, I would greatly appreciate it if you cited it. You can get the citation information by typing citation("renderthis") into R:

To cite renderthis in publications use:

Helveston, John Paul and Aden-Buie, Garrick (2021). renderthis: Render slides to different formats. R package version 0.2.2. https://jhelvy.github.io/renderthis/

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

@Manual{, title = {renderthis: Render slides to different formats}, author = {John Paul Helveston and Garrick Aden-Buie}, year = {2021}, note = {R package version 0.2.2}, url = {https://jhelvy.github.io/renderthis/}, }

Installing xaringanBuilder

If you want, you can still install the xaringanBuilder package as it was just prior to the name change with:

remotes::install_github("jhelvy/renderthis@v0.0.9")

Even though the install command mentions renderthis, the package will be installed as xaringanBuilder.