(Quietly) Announcing the PowerPoint support in R Markdown

Some of rstudio::conf 2018 attendees might still remember my quick whisper about the PowerPoint support in R Markdown. In fact, PPT has been supported in the rmarkdown package since early Jan this year, but there were still several improvements to make (in Pandoc and the RStudio IDE). Today we think it should be good enough for brave beta testers to try it out. Due to the fact that it requires the preview build of RStudio (not strictly true, but the RStudio preview build will make several things easier), please do us a favor not to publicize it on social media at the moment. The full documentation for the PowerPoint format in R Markdown can be found at:

You will realize that this is actually a section in a new book, which is not published yet. I'm still working on the revision, so again, please do not share the link on social media before we officially announce it in the RStudio blog.

If you find any issues related to the PowerPoint format, you may report them here or file them to the rmarkdown repo: https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/issues. If you have any suggestions or feedback on the new R Markdown book, we'd also love to hear them (feel free to file issues at https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown-book/issues). Thank you!

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I stumbled upon this book a couple of weeks ago, and I am so excited and appreciative to have it as a resource!

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I just discovered a very interesting package named slidex and developed by @DJAnderson07, which goes the opposite way: https://github.com/datalorax/slidex. It converts PPT to Markdown (specifically, the Markdown flavor of remark.js/xaringan). I just want to share it here since it sounds so amazing to me! :smile:

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Thanks so much for sharing @yihui! I would love any feedback anybody has to offer, and I'm certainly interested in collaborators if there's any interest in helping develop the package.

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Excellent feature! I'm using it with joy. I've had some issues with custom templates, issue filed in the rmarkdown repo https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/issues/1371

@yihui I found another "issue", but this time I'm not sure whether it's a bug or it's the expected behavior (TL;DR: setting fig.width and fig.height in opts_chunk$set(...) seems to prevent plots from being shown). Should I:

  1. comment in this thread including a proper MRE?
  2. create a new question on this community, with the R Markdown tag?
  3. create an issue on GitHub?

I could have just created an issue on GitHub, but maybe the behavior is intended: for example, you're not going to support setting fig.width and fig.height for the first release. In this case, I'd feel bad about increasing the number of open issues in the project, for something which is actually behaving as you intended.

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Please feel free to post a MRE anywhere. Options fig.height and fig.width definitely should work for PPT.

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