Creating presentations

Installation

The presentation theme is based on Yihui Xie’s excellent {xaringan} package. Hence the first thing to do is to install the necessary components as well as {iheiddown} itself. Note that we can also install the latest version of the package from GitHub directly by using remotes::install_github("jhollway/iheiddown").

# Install the required packages
install.packages("iheiddown")
remotes::install_github("yihui/xaringan")
install.packages("servr") # This will allow us to see the slides we are editing

# Load the packages in your session
pkgs <- c("iheiddown", "xaringan", "servr")
lapply(pkgs, library, character.only = TRUE)

Before we go any further, we should introduce {xaringan} a bit more since you’ll be working with when creating presentations with the {iheiddown} theme. The first thing to know is that there are many ways to create presentations in (R-)Markdown and that there is not one solution that fulfills all needs. However, after careful consideration (and reading this blog post) we settled on {xaringan}to develop our presentation template for.

If you want to know more about {xaringan} and other presentation packages for R, check out this excellent book.

Create your first presentation

Creating your first presentation is easy! Let’s look at how it is done. Before we begin, we have to create a new R project by clicking on the file tab in the top of the RStudio window and following the instructions of the prompt that appears. Now that we have created an R project for our presentation, we can open a new R-Markdown file. To do this click on the “plus file” logo in the top left corner and then on “R-Markdown”.

Step 1: Open a project

After you have done this, a little pop-up helper will appear. The first thing we will do is to select the {iheiddown} template for our presentation. To do so, click on the “From Template” option on the left and select the “Presentation {iheiddown}” template. Now give your presentation a name and click on “OK”.

Step 2: Select a template

Congrats! You just created your first presentation!

Hold on, this doesn’t look anything like slides!? To see your slides, you have to “knit” the code by clicking on the little “knit” button on the presentation.Rmd file. This will run all the code chunks and convert the markdown code to an HTML presentation that you will be able to share with your audience.

Take a moment to flick through the slides to get acquainted with the {R-markdown} syntax and to get a feel of the possibilities of {xaringan} and the {iheiddown} theme. These slides are as much a tutorial as this vignette!

Edit your presentation

This section will focus on giving you an overview of what a {xaringan} presentation is comprised of and give you a few tips and tricks to edit your presentations.

# Install/Load the servr package if you haven't done it already
install.packages("servr")
library(servr)

# Serve your {xaringan} presentation to see live updates when you edit
iheiddown::preview_start()

# Close the connection to the live rendering when you're done
iheiddown::preview_stop()

install.packages("RefManageR")

# Initializes the bibliography
library(RefManageR)
BibOptions(check.entries = FALSE,
           bib.style = "authoryear", # Bibliography style
           max.names = 3, # Max author names displayed in bibliography
           sorting = "nyt", #Name, year, title sorting
           cite.style = "authoryear", # citation style
           style = "markdown",
           hyperlink = FALSE,
           dashed = FALSE)
myBib <- ReadBib("myBib.bib", check = FALSE)
# Note: don't forget to clear the knitr cache to account for changes in the
# bibliography.

```{r refs, echo=FALSE, results="asis"}
PrintBibliography(myBib)
```

```{r refs, echo=FALSE, results="asis"}
PrintBibliography(bib, start = 1, end = 7)
```

Presenting

After creating your presentation, it is time to share it with the world! To do so, simply open the HTML file that was created in your project folder after you knitted it.

{xaringan} provides you with nifty shortcuts to toggle presenter mode (p) or duplicate the slides (c) to present them on a second screen. Clicking “h” will pull up the entire list of shortcuts. Present away!

Printing the slides

There are two main ways to print slides.

• Print the slides that you rendered after opening them in your browser just like you would print a normal Web page.
  • Works best in the Google Chrome browser
• Use pagedown::chrome_print() when viewing your Rmarkdown file
• Use xaringan_to_pdf() an extended printing function that works especially well for complex slide decks. You can find this function in this great blog article by Garrick Aden Buie.

Additional resources