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litedown

COLLAB
Velocity0.0

Lightweight R Markdown engine for rendering documents, books and slides

github.com/yihui/litedown ↗

litedown grows from a lean renderer into a book and site generator

r-markdownpublishingr-statsstatic-siteschunk-optionsknitr
◆Current state
litedown is Yihui Xie's minimal R Markdown alternative, shipping every few months with a tight list of chunk options and rendering controls. Recent releases added output filtering, plot selection via fig.keep, offline HTML rendering, and context queries from inside chunks. The newest release adds book and website project templates discoverable from RStudio's New Project dialog.
◆Where it's heading
The package is moving up a level: from rendering one document to scaffolding whole projects, which is the territory bookdown and blogdown occupy in the older stack. The chunk-option work continues underneath, consistently driven by named community requests rather than a roadmap.
◆Prediction
Expect the book and site templates to gain the surrounding tooling — navigation, cross-file references, publishing helpers — that a project generator needs.

◆Recent moves

  1. 1mo ago

    Book and website project templates land in litedown

    ⚡ SPARK

    The release where litedown stops being only a document renderer. Project scaffolding moves it onto bookdown and blogdown's ground while keeping the minimal-dependency premise.

    View source ↗
  2. 7mo ago

    Output filtering chunk option lets you reorder results

    Adds a filter chunk option that takes a custom function, making it possible to reorder output elements and interleave text and plots from a loop. A genuinely new degree of control over chunk output.

    View source ↗
  3. 9mo ago

    fig.keep option and better LaTeX footnotes

    Adds plot selection via fig.keep and loosens LaTeX footnote constraints so identifiers need not be numeric and content need not be a single paragraph. Steady chunk-option build-out.

    View source ↗
  4. 1y ago

    Package manual and news rendering improvements

    Refines the package-documentation helpers — internal help pages excluded from pkg_manual(), GitHub user and issue links added by pkg_news() — plus markdown parsing fixes. Aimed at package authors using litedown for their own docs.

    View source ↗
  5. 1y ago

    Offline HTML output and chunk context queries

    Adds an offline option that downloads web resources into the output, plus get_context() and raw_text() for chunk-level introspection and raw output. Replaces ref.label with the more general fill option.

    View source ↗
  6. 1y ago

    Preview cleanup, render shortcut and LaTeX cross-references

    Improves the roam() preview loop with a cleanup option and a keyboard shortcut, and extends cross-references to LaTeX output. Workflow polish on the authoring side.

    View source ↗