Writing wonderful tufte handouts with the tufte package and rmarkdown
Edward Tufte is one of most inspiring evangelists of effective data visualization of modern times.
His book on effective ways of showing data and telling stories with them has made a great impact on a lot of data-visualization tools and theories.
One of the most typical features of his books is the extensive use of side notes, with both images and text, to further explain concepts introduced in the main body text.
Given the popularity of this layout, R Markdown offers the possibility of creating documents containing side notes, letting you even introduce pieces of R code or plots generated from R code as side notes.
Getting ready
Before working with tufte handouts, we have to install and load the latest version of R Markdown on our computer (refer to the first recipe of this chapter for further information on markdown).
This can be easily done by running the following code:
install.packages(“rmarkdown”) library(rmarkdown)
