Why

• after you finished typing \documentclass{beamer} and \title{}, I have finished my first slide with markdown
• much less commands to remember, e.g. to write bullet points, just begin with a dash “-” instead of \begin{itemize} and \item; how things can be simpler?
• I know you want math to show you are a statistician, e.g. \(f(k)={n \choose k}p^{k}(1-p)^{n-k}\)
• you do not need to maintain output – only maintain a source file
• HTML5/CSS3 is much more fun than LaTeX

A bit R code

head(cars)

##   speed dist
## 1     4    2
## 2     4   10
## 3     7    4
## 4     7   22
## 5     8   16
## 6     9   10

cor(cars)

##        speed   dist
## speed 1.0000 0.8069
## dist  0.8069 1.0000

Graphics too

library(ggplot2)
qplot(speed, dist, data = cars) + geom_smooth()

How

• source editor: RStudio (perfect integration with knitr; one-click compilation); currently you have to use the preview version (>= 0.96.109)
• HTML5 slides converter: pandoc; this document was generated by: pandoc -s -S -i -t dzslides --mathjax knitr-slides.md -o knitr-slides.html
• the file knitr-slides.md is the markdown output from its source: library(knitr); knitr('knitr-slides.Rmd')
• or simple click the button Knit HTML in RStudio

For ninjas

• you should tweak the default style; why not try some Google web fonts? (think how painful it is to wrestle with fonts in LaTeX)
• pandoc provides 3 types of HTML5 slides (dzslides is one of them)
• you can tweak the default template to get better appearances
• if you have come up with a better dzslides template, please let me know or contribute to pandoc directly (e.g. pre blocks should have max-width and max-height)

For beamer lovers

• pandoc supports conversion to beamer as well. period.

For Powerpoint lovers

• …

Reproducible research

It is good to include the session info, e.g. this document is produced with knitr version 0.5.1. Here is my session info:

print(sessionInfo(), locale = FALSE)

## R version 2.15.0 (2012-03-30)
## Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] ggplot2_0.9.0 knitr_0.5.1  
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] codetools_0.2-8    colorspace_1.1-1   dichromat_1.2-4   
##  [4] digest_0.5.2       evaluate_0.4.2     formatR_0.4.1     
##  [7] grid_2.15.0        highlight_0.3.1    MASS_7.3-17       
## [10] memoise_0.1        munsell_0.3        parser_0.0-14     
## [13] plyr_1.7.1         proto_0.3-9.2      RColorBrewer_1.0-5
## [16] Rcpp_0.9.10        RCurl_1.91-1       reshape2_1.2.1    
## [19] scales_0.2.0       stringr_0.6        tools_2.15.0      
## [22] XML_3.6-2         

Life is short

• so keep your audience awake!