Thread by @juliesquid

"Yihui is a legendary type of hero in the R community." #Truth
slides.yihui.org/2019-dahshu-rm…

https://twitter.com/rstudio/status/1194591001849090050

1. tinytex is a small, powerful alternative to mactex
2. generate Rmds from your R scripts w/ a special syntax for comments: #`

...with knitr::spin
3. knitr::purl translates your .Rmd to .R script! With options for comments translating into code chunks. Or not. Or with full narratives and text.

4. add citations with knitr::write_bib. Great for citing packages! knitr::write_bib(package_name, .bib_file)
5. Cross-ref figures, tables, and sections! In action:

6. inline output of a character vector knitr::combine_words. Defaults to "and". So knitr::combine_words(c("apples", "oranges") becomes "apples and oranges"
And don't forget your oxford commas!

7. line breaks: add 2 spaces at the end of the line. But this can get tedious, so there's an RStudio add-in in blogdown: "quote poem". It adds 2 spaces to each line of the text you've selected. YES

8. put all your code in the appendix rather than the body of your report. Use `ref.label`.
Demo: {r, ref.label=knitr::all_labels() }, along with the setup chunk's knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo=FALSE).
Or, select your choice: {r, ref.label=c('some-code', 'more-code') }

9. Create an animation with `gifski` package and animation.hook='gifski'. Will animate your plots:

yihui.org/en/2018/08/gif…

10. Cache time-consuming code chunks with cache=TRUE. But use wisely, simple tricks can have costs and it might lead to more complications downstream
yihui.org/en/2018/06/cac…

11. Add logos to your R plots with {r, fig.process=function() } to post-process your R code chunk with the magick package.
You can also blur a plot with magick!
Another use of ref.label:: {r, ref.label='earlier-chunk-name' }
OMG I need to play with magick 😍

Woop – analogy of magick and The Force

12. Add real LaTeX math expressions to your R plots. Also using fig.process with dev = 'tikz'. Can be time consuming so a good usecase for cache=TRUE

13. Use other languages: RMarkdown is also really JuliaMarkdown, PythonMarkdown JavaScriptMarkdown, CSSMarkdown... just change the {r} to {python}!

More than 40 languages supported in knitr!!!!

14. Child documents. This is the best! You can knit shorter "child" documents into a "parent" document. A great way to avoid a huge monster document
{r, child='analysis.Rmd'}

15. Start bookdown and blogdown projects. There are different types of gitbooks too. Build book tab, Serve sites.
This has have changed my whole way of thinking about communication and publishing, I use them every day. And Yihui just showed many things I've never heard of!

Ummmm now Yihui is using his camera and facial recognition to make a simulation plot! What! That is amazing!!

Thank you SO much for this webinar @xieyihui and @DahShuInfo!