R-Ladies Presentation Ninja

So, you are doing an R-Ladies presentation…that’s awesome!

The short version

I made an R-Ladies theme for xaringan slides. My original tweet about it:

if you want to use @xieyihui's awesome #xaringan package for #rstats slides but want more #Rladies flavor, there is now a built-in theme for that (with code highlighting)! Thanks to the awesome @RLadiesGlobal starter kit. Update the CSS in your YAML to use 🧙🏽‍♀️🧞‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/YnlGSVAMsl

— Alison Hill (@apreshill) November 29, 2017

The way to use the theme is to update the YAML like so:

output:
  xaringan::moon_reader:
    css: ["default", "rladies", "rladies-fonts"]

Make sure your version of xaringan is up-to-date.

Below is a demo slide deck using the theme.

(view the source .Rmd on GitHub)

The longer story

I recommend Yihui’s xaringan package for slides. This is an R package, available through GitHub, for creating slideshows with remark.js through R Markdown. This means that you can:

• write all your slides in Markdown text
• include chunks of R code and rendered output like plots, results, tables, etc. in your slides
• use git for version control and share your GitHub repository

This makes xaringan ideal for an R-Ladies presentation!¹

To use the package, you’ll need the devtools package installed so that you can use the install_github function. Then do:

devtools::install_github('yihui/xaringan')

As Yihui points out in the documentation, if you use RStudio, you can use the menu to navigate to File -> New File -> R Markdown -> From Template -> Ninja Presentation, and you will see an R Markdown example.

I first used xaringan a few months ago. I was working with Yihui on the blogdown book, and had signed up to lead a workshop for the Portland R User group. Obviously, such a workshop could not have powerpoint slides, so it seemed like the perfect time to learn xaringan.

For my workshop, I made a simple website for the newly founded R-Ladies PDX using blogdown (Thanks to Augustina and Deeksha, our fearless organizers). So naturally, my slides needed more purple.

Luckily, the R-Ladies run a tight ship- they have a starter kit on GitHub that details all the pretty purples they like.

About a month after I did the R-Ladies blogdown workshop, I saw this blog post by Yihui:

First, I thought this was such a cool idea and I hope more people make and submit themes. Then I realized, I had already made a theme! I submitted a pull request², Yihui helped me make some edits to the CSS files to make them more parsimonious with the default theme, I electronically signed a contributor agreement, and now the theme is there for you all to enjoy and use! You use the theme by editing the YAML:

output:
  xaringan::moon_reader:
    css: ["default", "rladies", "rladies-fonts"]

If you use the theme and you are on twitter, I’d love to see it- please mention me on twitter!

Examples!

• My blogdown workshop slides: “Up and running with blogdown” (view the source .Rmd on GitHub)

• Jessica Minnier’s slides for “Building Shiny Apps: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility”