Jan 25, 2019 pagedown: Creating beautiful PDFs with R Markdown and CSS The traditional way to beautiful PDFs is often through LaTeX or Word, but have you ever thought of printing a web page to PDF? Web technologies (HTML/CSS/JavaScript) are becoming more and more. Pandoc can also produce PDF output: see creating a PDF, below. Pandoc’s enhanced version of Markdown includes syntax for tables, definition lists, metadata blocks, footnotes, citations, math, and much more. See below under Pandoc’s Markdown.

The content would be stored in the content folder where you will have to add your Markdown files. Ibis would read all of the.md files in the content folder and would use all h1 titles as the name of the chapters. If you are not familiar with Markdown, make sure to check out this guide here. Building the PDF. This project is to create a pdf file from a markdown file. Nodejs latest version; Steps. Download and install the latest version of nodejs. Navigate to the folder containing the create.js file. Create or update the package.json file using your favourite editor. The contents are as below.

Create Pdf From Markdown Table

• Summary: Translating Markdown to PDF is an essential part of many report generation systems. PDF is a portable format that can enable users to share files on mediuns such as instant messaging and email systems.

• Audience: Systems architects, JavaScript developers, Front-end developers, Back-end developers.

• This meeting: f4c75be3-34d8-4591-aa42-dcf6a6b56160
• Participants: Marcio S Galli
• Text Language: en-US
• Tags: NodeJS, PDF, Markdown.

Introduction

In this project, we will use JavaScript to generate a PDF file based on another file written in Markdown. The motivation for me is this: I usually write a document, using simple text, that covers an executive summary for most of my meetings. I want to have a PDF of it. Anyway, that is my case — your situation might be something else.

What matters is that I was using Markdown already. Markdown is the well-known lightweight markup language designed to be easily converted to HTML. Developers know that, but if you don’t know, now you know. Since Markdown can become HTML and HTML can become PDF, I had the idea to start wrapping my reports to PDF.

Let’s see a simple file in Markdown

Let’s see the PDF generated from it

The following screenshot is here to help you visualize the whole flow more easily:

You may also download the PDF:

Introducing Markdown-pdf

The good news is that I didn’t even have to do these two steps, although I think it’s important to stress that because the library that I have used is doing behind the scenes. If you want to check, this library is markdown-pdf.

Although this library will help you do the conversion using the command line, the following sample will show how to do the conversion programmatically via JavaScript.

The sample code — in JavaScript using Node.js

The following is the main file in JavaScript. This sample is a server-side JavaScript that will render a PDF using the input file “./db/test.md”:

I have published the simple script here:

The following structure shows how this sample looks in the filesystem:

The above sample case will let do a conversion of the provided sample file. To get it going, you will need to clone the project and be familiar with Node.js and npm (Node Package Manager).

Let’s look at the underlying libraries

To conclude this article, I wanted to tell you that I did a check on the file package.json from Markdown-pdf and was able get an overview of some of the key underlying library projects used by the author, which is:

• “remarkable” — a project that can convert Markdown to HTML.

• “phantomjs-prebuilt” — a project of a browser rendering engine that does the HTML rendering job behind the scenes. PhantomJS can also generate “the page” as PDF.

References

• Sample code — Let’s Generate a PDF from a Markdown file
• Library showcased — https://www.npmjs.com/package/markdown-pdf
• Sample code — Generating PDF Files Using Markdown files with Images

About

This article was published at JavaScript in Plain English. Thanks to the editors of Plain English for the help in terms of reviewing. Thanks to the author of Markdown-pdf, Alan Shaw.

In the previous tutorials we’ve learned about the R Markdown format and how to create a report using R Markdown in RStudio. In this tutorial, we will render or knit an R Markdown document to a web friendly, html format using the Rknitr package. knitr can be used to convert R Markdown files to many different formats including: html, pdf, GitHub markdown (.md) and more.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this lesson, you will:

• Be able to produce (knit) an html file from an R Markdown file.
• Know how to modify chuck options to change what is rendered and not rendered on the output html file.

What You Need

You will need the most current version of R and, preferably, RStudio loaded on your computer to complete this tutorial. You will also need an R Markdown document that contains a YAML header, code chunks and markdown segments.

Create Pdf From Markdown File

Install R Packages

• knitr:install.packages('knitr')
• rmarkdown:install.packages('rmarkdown')

What is Knitr?

knitr is the R package that we use to convert an R Markdown document into another, more user friendly format like .html or .pdf.

The knitr package allows us to:

• Publish & share preliminary results with collaborators.
• Create professional reports that document our workflow and results directly from our code, reducing the risk of accidental copy and paste or transcription errors.
• Document our workflow to facilitate reproducibility.
• Efficiently change code outputs (figures, files) given changes in the data, methods, etc.

The knitr package was designed to be a transparent engine for dynamic report generation with R – Yihui Xi – knitr package creator

When To Knit: Knitting is a useful exercise throughout your scientific workflow. It allows you to see what your outputs look like and also to test that your code runs without errors. The time required to knit depends on the length and complexity of the script and the size of your data.

Create Pdf From Markdown Word

How to Knit

To knit in RStudio, click the Knit pull down button. You want to use the Knit HTML option for this lesson.

When you click the Knit HTML button, a window will open in your console titled R Markdown. This pane shows the knitting progress. The output (html in this case) file will automatically be saved in the current working directory. If there is an error in the code, an error message will appear with a line number in the R Console to help you diagnose the problem.

Data tip: You can run knitr from the command prompt using: render(“input.Rmd”, “all”).

View the Output

When knitting is complete, the html file produced will automatically open.

Notice that information from the YAML header (title, author, date) is printed at the top of the HTML document. Then the html shows the text, code, and results of the code that you included in the Rmd document.

Challenge Activity

Add the code below to your .Rmd document. Then knit to .html format.

When you knit your .Rmd file to pdf, the plot you produce should look like the one below. Not so pretty, eh? Don’t worry - we will learn more about plotting in a later tutorial!

Where is the File?

In the steps above, we downloaded a file. However, where did that file go on your computer? Let’s find it before we go any further.

Is the boulder-precip.csv file there?