R Markdown is superior to LaTeX

[link—standalone]

So today marks the day when i decided to pretty much do a video series on RMarkdown. I love RMarkdown as the medium for a variety of things in my daily life namely:

• Business Reports
• Data Analysis (EDA) Documents
• Markdown Documentation
• HTML Wiki Documents with the tabsets
• A Flexible Jupyter like document with multi-lang support
• LaTeX support without the bloat or learning curve
• Bib file support for references when i cite sources
• Great looking documents with minimal effort and code

The benefits go on and on. I cannot stop raving about RMarkdown I was using LaTeX to take some research notes on a viking burial and archeological site in York, but quickly just the syntax to make a bullet list is maddeningly long:

\begin{itemize}
\item item1
\item item2
\item item3
\end{itemize}

Thats just crazy right?! just to make a bullet list when in markdown type documents all you need is some dashes:

- item1
- item2
- item3

Im sure that once you reach the realm of complex thesis and dissertation writing, scientific journaling, or other high level, large volume publication type work that the specific skill set of LaTeX will become essential, but more most intents and purposes i find that RMarkdown can suffice for all my needs to not only GREAT looking documents, but can act like a jupyter notebook, can cite references with a bib file, and has limitless levels of customization and flexibility.

All of this fails to mention the R packages:

• Pagedown
• Blogdown
• Bookdown

These packages allow you to create long documents, even whole books, with all the power and customization of RMarkdown. Sure there may be some niche areas and edge cases where LaTeX just cannot be beat, but RMarkdown also supports LaTeX sytax and math equations so until you reach the highest levels of technical need for LaTeX, RMarkdown REALLY can seem to do it all for you and take you very far with a lot less of a learning curve and more approachable and less overwhelming syntax and list of options.

Also this brings up the fact that many books on R and RMarkdown are free and open source online, and give a very user friendly approach into the world of RMarkdown.

For the video this post is related to, you can watch it HERE