Yihui Xie: An anatomy of R Markdown with minimal applications

Abstract: You may have wondered what actually happens behind the scenes when you click the Knit button in RStudio to render an R Markdown (or Quarto) document. The answer is, it's complicated. However, it's possible to explain the basic ideas with minimal examples. In this talk, I'll show you the basic process of rendering R Markdown to HTML and LaTeX. After you learn the nuts and bolts, you may be able to create your own favorite output style, especially if you know CSS, JavaScript, and LaTeX techniques (you do not have to be an expert---I'm certainly not). I will demonstrate the world's simplest HTML slides as an application, which only requires a couple of lines of CSS. This talk is mainly intended for people who are curious about web technologies, and better yet, minimalists (like me).

Bio: Yihui Xie (https://yihui.org) is a software engineer at Posit Software, PBC (formerly named RStudio).