Chapter 7 xaringan Presentations

We have introduced a few HTML5 presentation formats in Chapter4. Thexaringan package(Xie 2022) is an R Markdown extension based on the JavaScript library remark.js (https://remarkjs.com) to generate HTML5 presentations of a different style. See Figure7.1 for two sample slides.

FIGURE 7.1: Two sample slides created from the xaringan package.

The name “xaringan” came from Sharingan (http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/Sharingan) in the Japanese manga and anime “Naruto.” The word was deliberately chosen to be difficult to pronounce for most people (unless you have watched the anime), because its author (me) loved the style very much, and was concerned that it would become too popular.⁸ The concern was somewhat naive, because the style is actually very customizable, and users started to contribute more themes to the package later.

Thexaringan package is based on the JavaScript library remark.js (https://remarkjs.com); remark.js only supports Markdown, andxaringan added the support for R Markdown as well as other utilities to make it easier to build and preview slides.

You can learn more about the background stories and the usage of thexaringan package from the documentation athttp://slides.yihui.name/xaringan/, which is actually a set of slides generated fromxaringan. You may also read a potentially biased blog post of mine to know why I preferredxaringan / remark.js for HTML5 presentations:https://yihui.name/en/2017/08/why-xaringan-remark-js/.

8. The main reason I stopped using LaTeX Beamer slides was because of its popularity: when you attend academic conferences, you see Beamer slides everywhere.↩︎