My current approach to preparing presentations for the ds-incubator

Preparing presentations take time and one way to save some time is to create and reuse templates for the files that you need for producing the slides.

Here I share my approach to prepare presentations for the ds-incubator.

Bookdown

• I type some-file.Rmd file (usually with the format <yyy-mm-dd>_<topic>.Rmd) at the root of a bookdown project.
• I build the book into docs/ and host it on GitHub pages.

Slides

I render some-file.Rmd with render_ioslides("some-file.Rmd") to produce some-file.html, then print a .pdf from the web browser. I use the .html version while I speak, and store the .pdf version for the records (example).

• render_ioslides() looks like this:

render_ioslides <- function(path, ...) {
  stopifnot(!missing(path))
  stopifnot(fs::file_exists("slides"))

  tf <- fs::file_copy("slides", "slides.Rmd")
  on.exit(fs::file_delete(tf))

  rmarkdown::render(
    input = tf,
    output_format = "ioslides_presentation",
    output_file = fs::path_ext_remove(path),
    params = list(child = path),
    ...
  )
}

• render_ioslides() uses the file "slides" located at the root of the bookdown project. The "slides" file has no extension so it's ignored when bookdown builds the book. This is what "slides" look like:

---
title: "go to next slide"
params:
  child: "placeholder"
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  echo = TRUE,
  comment = "#>",
  error = TRUE,
  collapse = TRUE
)
```

```{r, child=params$child}
```

--

Thanks @cjyetman for motivating this post.

Read the issue and the referenced R/render_ioslides.R entry point, then review the root-level slides template and the linked GitHub Pages example. The issue shares an approach but does not specify a requested documentation change or a completion criterion, so confirm the intended outcome before starting.