R markdown -two columns

cj_risk · October 10, 2018, 8:47pm

I’m am working on transitioning some reports to r markdown. Our standards include a header and a logo with a two column body for text with all the graphs/viz starting on a new page, which is also in a two column format with up to six graphs per page. The graphs are unrelated so they can’t be grouped as multiple plots in ggplot. Are there any reference materials, or sample code, that you would recommend to get us started on this project? We are stuck on how to code a two column format in r markdown, and how to set up multiple unrelated graphs on one page.

cderv · October 11, 2018, 6:35am

You can find some format with two column layout like pinp that modifies the already existing PNAS model in rticles . In the latter, there are several model and maybe other are two columns. They are based on LaTeX to produce pdf output - you could use them directly and customise, or look at the code and see how it is done. There is some Latex that can help also.

If what you want is close to dashboard with text and graph and you want html output, you should look at flexdashboard that offers a layout feature that you can use to achieve two column layout.

For html_document output, you may also use css layout to customise your output the way you want.

cj_risk · October 18, 2018, 6:29pm

Thanks. Very helpful.

jcblum · October 18, 2018, 7:34pm

For composing unrelated ggplot2 plots into a single graphic (probably the easiest way to ensure that they are all on the same page), there are now several options:

gridExtra accomplishes this with its grid.arrange() and arrangeGrob() functions
cowplot can do this via its plot_grid() function
ggpubr has ggarrange(), which is a wrapper around plot_grid() that adds some functionality
Newer on the scene, the patchwork package is not yet on CRAN, but worth checking out. Its entire goal is "to make it ridiculously simple to combine separate ggplots into the same graphic".

This post has some examples of using the first three: