7

When working in R Markdown, I typically add text outside of a chunk (e.g., figure/tables headings) but in this case I need to loop through 50+ variables to create a couple plots specific to each variable. Hence, I'm adding a few lines of text within the code chunk so that it is included with each set of plots. Ideally, I'd also like to add a page break before moving on to the next variable as well. I'm knitting to Word (this is the format that has been requested of me).

I've tried adding spaces after each line, "/newline", "/n", without success (I've tried with one backslash and two, as I wasn't clear which to use for a Word doc). I could just edit the document manually but that kind of defeats the purpose! Any tips would be appreciated.

```{r create plots, echo=FALSE, fig.height=8, fig.width=8, results='asis'}

for (i in seq(1, nrow(variables))) {
  x <- variables[i,]
  x <- drop.levels(x)
  var <- x$variables

# Add some text
cat("Variable: **", paste(var), "** (N = ", number obs, ")", sep="")  
cat("\n")  
cat("More Text")    
cat("\n")  
cat("Even more text")  

# Create plots.....

# insert page break
cat("\pagebreak")
}

```

Jean S.
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  • for new lines: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29575768/r-markdown-format-text-in-code-chunk-with-new-lines/29581239 – jac Mar 29 '18 at 16:49
  • change cat("\n") to cat(" \n") (2 spaces) for the newlines. see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24672111/how-to-add-a-page-break-in-word-document-generated-by-rstudio-markdown for page breaks in word output. TL;DR -- it's hard and involves changing the word template. – atiretoo Mar 29 '18 at 17:24
  • Thank you! This worked. I knew something wasn't quite right with my original code. – Jean S. Mar 30 '18 at 12:18

3 Answers3

8

After following the directions at How to add a page break in word document generated by RStudio & markdown to create the reference_docx, this seems to do what you want

---
output: 
  word_document:
     reference_docx: headingfive.docx
---
```{r, results="asis"}
for (var in LETTERS[1:6]){
  # Add some text
  cat("Variable: **", paste(var), "**",  sep="")  
  cat("  \n")  
  cat("More Text")    
  cat("  \n")  
  cat("Even more text")  
  cat("  \n")

  # Create plots.....

  # insert page break
  cat("\n")
  cat("#####\n")
  cat("\n")


}
```

The extra "\n" at the end of the level 5 heading, and before/after, are important.

atiretoo
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  • Thanks for this! I still couldn't insert a break from RMarkdown, but just added the ##### and used find/replace in Excel to insert a page break- I had no idea "^m" was an option. – Jean S. Mar 30 '18 at 12:19
  • Voting up and / or accepting the answer is much appreciated. – atiretoo Mar 30 '18 at 12:59
0

This simple solution works for me:

  1. Add the option, comment=NA to suppress the hashtags in your chunk.
  2. Insert an invisible character, followed by a line feed, for each line you want to insert.

In the example below, blanks <- rep(c(' ', '\n'),5) has a first term that looks like a blank space ' '. However, between the single quotes, the space was actually created by typing the keystroke shortcut, [CTRL]+ 255. In your markdown document, the inserted character will appear as a single dot, highlighted in pink.

Here's some sample code:


blanks <- rep(c(' ', '\n'),5) # This will print five blank lines between plots. 

AddBreak <- function() {
for (i in blanks)
  cat(i)
}

p1 <- plot(data.frame(a = seq(1,16,by=1), b = sample(10:20,16, replace = TRUE)), main="Plot 1")
p2 <- plot(data.frame(a = seq(1,16,by=2), b = sample(10:20,8,  replace = TRUE)), main="Plot 2")
p3 <- plot(data.frame(a = seq(1,32,by=1), b = sample(10:20,32, replace = TRUE)), main="Plot 3")

p1
AddBreak()
p2
AddBreak()
p3
A Nakamura
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0

The easiest way add a break line is:

cat('<br>')

So, in your example:

# Add some text
cat("Variable: **", paste(var), "** (N = ", number obs, ")", sep="")  
cat('<br>')  
cat("More Text")    
cat('<br>')
cat("Even more text")
Intriguing
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