ioslides with R Markdown

Over the weekend, I decided to write up some slides for my stats section on Monday. Having really gotten into the groove of using R Markdown, and having gotten a little rusty on using LaTeX with knitr, I decided to play around with HTML5 slides instead of going the beamer route. In the spirit of results first, the finished presentation is shown below. Click inside the frame, then use your left and right arrows to navigate.

I was at first very interested in using reveal.js, as I really liked the multi-dimensional aspect of the presentation. I had a code chunk that demonstrated using stat_function() in ggplot2, and included a hexidecimal color value. I wanted to have a brief aside where I could discuss hex colors without putting it right in the path of the rest of the rest of the presentation. I know this was a bit of a tangent from the main discussion, and it wasn’t super relevant, but I wanted to have the information in there anyway. In case someone asked about it (I tell myself).

Using the revealjs package, I created a new R Markdown file that would output as a reveal.js presentation. I looked up the documentation on how to do everything within RStudio, and got going. However, I quickly ran into a problem. When using RStudio, reveal.js only allows for vertical arrangement of slides within sections. That is to say, the presentation would be organized with columns of slides, each belonging to the same section. The trouble is that section heading slides only contain the name of the section, and no further information. So it’s not possible, as far as I could figure out, to create a new slide below my ggplot2 slide that would talk about hexidecimal colors, as the slide on the “main” level could only show the section name, not the full slide contents. Back to the drawing board.

I experimented with DZSlides and Slidy, but ultimately decided on ioslides because it seemed that RStudio had pretty good support and documentation for that format. For one, it doesn’t require using command line pandoc in order to write into the slide format, which is very helpful. ioslides doesn’t feature two-dimensional presentation, and it’s not incredibly customizable, but it looks really good right out of the box.

The main customization I ended up using frequently is {.build}. Placed immediately after a new slide title, this command prints each element of the slide separately, one after another. Using incremental: true in the YAML header does this for ordered and unordered lists, but I wanted to make sure that my R code chunks would appear at the right times as well. Without {.build}, the slide would appear without text, but with the code chunks already printed. Unfortunately, I could not work out a way to declare the {.build} attribute for every slide. I tried putting build: true in the YAML header (similar to using smaller: true in the header rather than {.smaller} for every slide), but it didn’t work. So I have the attribute listed at the head of all slides that are not just showing plots (where it doesn’t really matter if things are loaded one at a time).

Beyond being mindful of what fits on one slide and the {.build} attribute, creating the ioslides presentation in RStudio was really not much different from creating any other R Markdown document. And, being HTML, it knitted much faster, enabling easier and quicker previewing of slides.

I’d say that the section went over well, and I certainly felt much more comfortable working through presentation slides instead of raw R script. It gave the section much more structure, and required me to spend more time thinking about the material we were going to cover and how best to present it. Hopefully that this post is useful for those considering writing presentation slides in RStudio.