R Markdown

R Markdown

R Markdown is a document format that allows easy creation of dynamic documents, reports, presentations, and more from R. It combines Markdown text with embedded R code chunks that can be executed to generate output and visualizations.
R Markdown image
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R Markdown: Create Dynamic Documents

A document format allowing easy creation of dynamic documents, reports, presentations, and more from R, with embedded code chunks for execution and visualization.

What is R Markdown?

R Markdown is an open-source document format created by RStudio. It allows you to create fully-reproducible data analysis reports, presentations, dashboards, interactive applications, books, dissertations, websites, and more from R.

R Markdown documents contain text written in Markdown, a simple formatting syntax for authoring web pages, interspersed with chunks of embedded R code. When you render an R Markdown document, the R code chunks are executed and their output inserted back into the final document.

This enables you to create dynamic analysis documents that combine code, formatted text, results, and visualizations in a single document. R Markdown supports dozens of output formats including HTML, PDF, MS Word, beamer slides, interactive dashboards, websites, books, journal articles and more.

Some key advantages of R Markdown include:

  • Reproducibility - the code executes whenever the document renders
  • Ease of collaboration - Markdown text is simple for others to edit
  • Multi-format output - supports PDF, Word, HTML, slides and more from a single source file
  • Integration of text, code, results and visualizations
  • Support for dozens of R, Python and other languages

With RStudio IDE, you get authoring features like syntax highlighting, markdown preview, reference lookup, R code execution and more. So R Markdown brings together an easy-to-write plain text format with the power of R and other languages to create dynamic analysis documents and reports.

R Markdown Features

Features

  1. Combines Markdown text with embedded R code chunks
  2. Allows creation of dynamic documents, reports, presentations, dashboards, books, and more
  3. Output can be exported to HTML, PDF, MS Word, ebooks, and more
  4. Supports code chunk options like caching results, specifying chunk options, etc
  5. Integrates with RStudio IDE for authoring
  6. Supports LaTeX math expressions
  7. Can embed output from running R code like plots, tables, summaries, etc

Pricing

  • Open Source

Pros

Easy to write and read compared to raw R scripts

Reproducible analysis and reporting by embedding code

Flexible output formats

Good for collaborating and sharing analysis

Cons

Requires learning Markdown syntax

More complex than plain R scripts

Rendering can be slow for large documents

Limited capabilities compared to LaTeX/Word for advanced publishing


The Best R Markdown Alternatives

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Markdown

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, which is then converted to structurally valid HTML. Some key features of Markdown include:It's simple to learn and use, with a plain text formatting syntax designed to be readable and easy to...
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