Use text variable in rmarkdown

Question

I want to use a text variable for a html, pdf, and word output with knitr. This is the code I currently have in markdown

I want to set a variable

var <- "just some text"

so that I don't need to write the text 3 different times

(please apologize the bad code, I am very new to this)

 For HTML Only ```{asis, echo=is_html_output()} <p>just some text</p> ``` For PDF Only \\color{ecbblue}{\\scriptsize{just some text}} For DOCX Only ```{asis, echo=is_word_output()} just some text 

Answer 1

If you want to work in LaTex you can use this code :

\usepackage{xspace}
newcommand{\VarName}{text to insert\xspace}

Then whenever you want

text to insert

So as an example you could do :

\color{blue}{\scriptsize{\VarName}}

would return text to insert in blue just like you want. This will indeed only work for text variable.

---

Edit : while the other answer is good, if you want to do it the R way I suggest to instead use the pander package which does a really good job and is even simpler.

install.packages("pander")
library("pander")

For LaTeX(PDF) in your R chunks simply do :

pander(cat("\\textcolor{red}{", var ,"}"))

For HTML in your R chunks simply do :

pander(cat("<span style=color:red>", var, "</span>"))

Answer 2

You can define your variable in an invisible code chunk and output it in an inline expression. That way you don't need to handle <p> etc.:

---
output:
  pdf_document: default
  word_document: default
  html_document: default
---

```{r, include=FALSE}
var <- "just some text"
h2 <- "Text2"
```

## `r h2`

`r if(knitr::is_latex_output()) paste("\\textcolor{blue}{\\scriptsize", var, "}") else var`

Note that I am using \\textcolor instead of \\color , since the latter does not take an argument and will make all following text also blue.