Have you ever tried to find a lightweight yet nice theme for the R Markdown documents, like this page?

Themes for R Markdown

With the powerful rmarkdown package, we could easily create nice HTML document by adding some meta information in the header, for example

---
title: Nineteen Years Later
author: Harry Potter
date: July 31, 2016
output:
  rmarkdown::html_document:
    theme: lumen
---

The html_document engine uses the Bootswatch theme library to support different styles of the document. This is a quick and easy way to tune the appearance of your document, yet with the price of a large file size (> 700KB) since the whole Bootstrap library needs to be packed in.

For package vignettes, we can use the html_vignette engine to generate a more lightweight HTML file that is meant to minimize the package size, but the output HTML is less stylish than the html_document ones.

So can we do BOTH, a lightweight yet nice-looking theme for R Markdown?

The prettydoc Engine

The answer is YES! (At least towards that direction)

The prettydoc package (available on CRAN) provides an alternative engine, html_pretty, to knit your R Markdown document into pretty HTML pages. Its usage is extremely easy: simply replace the rmarkdown::html_document or rmarkdown::html_vignette output engine by prettydoc::html_pretty in your R Markdown header, and use one of the built-in themes and syntax highlighters. For example

---
title: Nineteen Years Later
author: Harry Potter
date: July 31, 2016
output:
  prettydoc::html_pretty:
    theme: cayman
    highlight: github
---

You can also create documents from prettydoc templates in RStudio (after installing the package).

Step 1: Click the “New File” button and choose “R Markdown”.

Step 2: In the “From Template” tab, choose one of the built-in templates.

Options and Themes

The options for the html_pretty engine are fully compatible with the default html_document (see the documentation) with two exceptions:

1. The theme option can take value from cayman, tactile and architect. More themes will be added in the future. The themes contained in prettydoc are much inspired by and modified from various Github page themes.
2. The highlight options takes value from github and vignette.

Gallery

Here are some screenshots of the HTML pages generated by prettydoc with different themes and syntax highlighters.

Cayman (demo page)

Tactile (demo page)

Architect (demo page)

If you think this package is helpful, feel free to leave comments or request features in the Github repository. Contribution and pull requests are always welcome.