The acstats package (derived from Chester Ismay's reedtemplates package at ismayc/reedtemplates with only minor modifications) includes a R Markdown template for the Amherst College Statistics Comprehensive Evaluation report. If you'd like to see the PDF document the template produces, it can be found here.
Under the hood, LaTeX templates are used to ensure that documents conform precisely to submission standards. At the same time, composition and formatting can be done using lightweight markdown syntax, and R code and its output can be seamlessly included using knitr.
The acstats package has some prerequisites which are described below. To compile PDF documents using R, you are going to need to have LaTeX installed. It can be downloaded for Windows at http://http://miktex.org/download and for Mac at http://tug.org/mactex/mactex-download.html. Follow the instructions to install the necessary packages after downloading the (somewhat large) installer files. You may need to install a few extra LaTeX packages on your first attempt to knit as well.
To use acstats from RStudio (including the Amherst College RStudio server):
- Within RStudio, install the package:
install.packages("devtools") # if not already installed
devtools::install_github("Amherst-Statistics/acstats")
- Use the New R Markdown dialog to create an article from one of the templates:
1.) If the images display super tiny, try this fix where you are adding an image "example.jpeg" which is contained in a "images" subfolder:
```{r image_block, echo=FALSE, fig.cap="Example caption", purl=FALSE} knitr::include_graphics("images/example.jpeg")
2.) If the images are showing up funky places on the page (i.e. you wanted to put the image in-line with text and it’s popping up at the top of the page), try deleting all white space above and below the code chunk.