RStudio knitr themes

Question

I've just started playing with some of the new knitr features in RStudio.

I've tried selecting several of the different themes in the R Markdown settings dialogue but these don't seem to have any noticeable impact on the style of my resulting document. Should it, or am I missing something? Everything just seems to come out in the default style no matter what theme I select.

---
output:
  html_document:
    number_sections: yes
    theme: spacelab
    toc: yes
  pdf_document: default
  word_document: default
---

Installation details:

• R version 3.1.1
• RStudio Version 0.98.977
• knitr 1.6
• rmarkdown 0.2.50
• htmltools 0.2.4
• Windows 7

Answer 1

I had the same problem. Learning the following led me to the solution.

Two different things show up if you google "knitr theme".

1. highlight parameter = syntax highlighting ( 1 , 2 , 3 —familiar keywords like kate, tango, solarized-dark)
2. theme parameter = bootswatch CSS (these are the less familiar keywords like spacelab , superhero, united, yeti)

Here are the instructions of how to add the correct knitr flags at the top of your .Rmd file.

---

Once you've added something like

---
title: "Impressive Client Report"
output:
  html_document:
    theme: spacelab
    highlight: neon
---

to the top, then open R in the directory where your .Rmd file lives, and run

require(knitr)
knit(input='impressive report.Rmd', output='impressive_report.Rhtml')

(I switched to _ because of another gotcha: I was switching between command-line R and RStudio knitting, not realising that RStudio was creating a different .html file to the one R was creating.)

---

Or in the case of RStudio, just Ctrl + Shift + K to knit your .Rmd file from the editing window— after changing both theme and highlight to valid values.

Answer 2

I had this exact same problem and I was able to solve it by placing the theme argument before any other arguments. I am unsure if the order matters, but in my case it did. For example, this correctly changes my html theme:

---
title: "A Title"
author: "An Author"
date: "last update: `r format(Sys.Date(), format = '%d %B %Y')`" 
output: 
  html_document:
    theme: flatly
    highlight: haddock
    toc: true
    toc_float:
      collapsed: false
      smooth_scroll: true
---

While providing the theme argument towards the end did not work:

---
title: "A Title"
author: "An Author"
date: "last update: `r format(Sys.Date(), format = '%d %B %Y')`" 
output: 
  html_document:
    toc: true
    toc_float:
      collapsed: false
      smooth_scroll: true
  theme: flatly
  highlight: haddock
---

This also was true for my syntax highlighting argument.

Answer 3

Be sure that you activate the following option in your RStudio: Tools --> Global Options... --> Sweave --> Weave Rnw files using: knitr

At least it worked with me while compiling pdf from tex format.