Chapter 7 xaringan Presentations
We have introduced a few HTML5 presentation formats in Chapter 4. The xaringan 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 Figure 7.1 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.
The xaringan package is based on the JavaScript library remark.js (https://remarkjs.com); remark.js only supports Markdown, and xaringan 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 the xaringan package from the documentation at http://slides.yihui.name/xaringan/, which is actually a set of slides generated from xaringan. You may also read a potentially biased blog post of mine to know why I preferred xaringan / remark.js for HTML5 presentations: https://yihui.name/en/2017/08/why-xaringan-remark-js/.
References
The main reason I stopped using LaTeX Beamer slides was because of its popularity: when you attend academic conferences, you see Beamer slides everywhere.↩︎