Markdown

In this 45 minutes session we introduce the concept of markup languages in combination with pandoc and working with the terminal. In particular we focus on markdown: a very lightweight and markup language (and probably the fastest way to create slides). In particular we deal with:

1. Markdown
2. Pandoc
3. Rstudio

Although the second one, pandoc, is not completely necessary (it is under the hood of RStudio), we think it is important and handy enough to spend some attention to.

Requirements

For this session, we basically need only one tool: RStudio.

For the assignment we will partly replicate this paper. The basic (unstructured) document for the assignment is here (in .zip format).

Outcomes

After this session you should:

• understand the basic command of the markdown language;
• be able to write a (part of a) paper in markdown in RStudio including:
  • headers;
  • links;
  • formula’s;
  • lists;
  • figures.
• be able to export this to:
  • HTML export;
  • pdf export;
  • Words’ docx export.

Slides

• html
• pdf

References

Markdown:

• Markdown: Background information
• Markdown versus Latex: An interesting point of view by Yihui Xie.

R, RStudio, knitr and RMarkdown:

• Rand Rstudio: Online learning of the basic r studio commands
• RMarkdown Cheatsheet: Can come in handy

Pandoc:

• Pandoc: John Macfarlane really deserves some credit; if only for conversion to Word (there is always those coauthors who….)