Custom html template in Rstudio using Rmarkdown without having to create a package?

Question

I'm trying to create a few custom templates (one for html and one for pdfs) which use specific structures and fonts, with the aim of using these in Rstudio:

The reason I want to do this is that there doesn't seem to be a consistent way in which to change some parameters across pdf/html such as changing font in the document, and thus I'm having to do this differently across those two file types.

I've poured over the endless blogs/pdf articles about how to do this, with the most pertinent probably being this: https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/document-templates.html

However, from what I've seen you need to create a package in order to add a template to this list. Is that the case?, or can I simply create a template and add it to some folder somewhere (i.e. inst/rmarkdown/templates)?

Thank you

Answer 1

You can do this by creating a package. And it is not as difficult as you think it would be. Create a package in RStudio. Then in the console, write

usethis::use_rmarkdown_template

This will create the folder structure required for the template to work. You will just have to edit the skeleton.rmd file.