Vignettes are long form documentation commonly included in packages. Because they are part of the distribution of the package, they need to be as compact as possible. The html_vignette output type provides a custom style sheet (and tweaks some options) to ensure that the resulting html is as small as possible. The html_vignette format:

Vignette Info

Note the various macros within the vignette section of the metadata block above. These are required in order to instruct R how to build the vignette. Note that you should change the title field and the \VignetteIndexEntry to match the title of your vignette.

Styles

The html_vignette template includes a basic CSS theme. To override this theme you can specify your own CSS in the document metadata as follows:

output: 
  rmarkdown::html_vignette:
    css: mystyles.css

Figures

The figure sizes have been customised so that you can easily put two images side-by-side.

plot(1:10)
plot(10:1)

You can enable figure captions by fig_caption: yes in YAML:

output:
  rmarkdown::html_vignette:
    fig_caption: yes

Then you can use the chunk option fig.cap = "Your figure caption." in knitr.

More Examples

You can write math expressions, e.g. \(Y = X\beta + \epsilon\), footnotes1, and tables, e.g. using knitr::kable().

mpg cyl disp hp drat wt qsec vs am gear carb
Mazda RX4 21.0 6 160.0 110 3.90 2.620 16.46 0 1 4 4
Mazda RX4 Wag 21.0 6 160.0 110 3.90 2.875 17.02 0 1 4 4
Datsun 710 22.8 4 108.0 93 3.85 2.320 18.61 1 1 4 1
Hornet 4 Drive 21.4 6 258.0 110 3.08 3.215 19.44 1 0 3 1
Hornet Sportabout 18.7 8 360.0 175 3.15 3.440 17.02 0 0 3 2
Valiant 18.1 6 225.0 105 2.76 3.460 20.22 1 0 3 1
Duster 360 14.3 8 360.0 245 3.21 3.570 15.84 0 0 3 4
Merc 240D 24.4 4 146.7 62 3.69 3.190 20.00 1 0 4 2
Merc 230 22.8 4 140.8 95 3.92 3.150 22.90 1 0 4 2
Merc 280 19.2 6 167.6 123 3.92 3.440 18.30 1 0 4 4

Also a quote using >:

“He who gives up [code] safety for [code] speed deserves neither.” (via)

  1. A footnote here.↩