I’ve started this blog five years ago using wordpress. But I admit that it was quite painful to write the articles about R in wordpress.

I had to write the R-code in RStudio, copy it to wordpress. Then I had to run the code and copy the output to wordpress, too.

Any time I want to make changes to the code this procedure gets quite tedious. I’ve also tried to do some steps at medium. But the steps for publishing were the same.

So I was pleased when I stumbled across blogdown. Using blogdown I can write my R code and the article in one step.

As I’m moving this blog from wordpress to blogdown (also see the book about blogdown) I was wonderung how I can get some nice syntax highlighting of the embedded R-code.

The first impression was quite sobering. I used the default .Rmd page type and I got not much highlighting. It was better than that I got at Medium with base functionality. But it’s not quite what I wanted.

But there are two other file types in blogdown.

.md is for simple markdown-pages without any R-code. But the other one .Rmarkdown seems to be more promising.

Okay, the title may be a little misleading. But it addresses the problem I have.

I’m running many different R projects in production. So they must run in a reproductive way and I can’t afford that the programs break if a package update is installed.

As time has gone by using custom fonts in ggplot2 graphics and LaTeX Documents is still challenging but easier than years ago.

When someone asks me what’s the main advantage of R over python I almost always answer: “It’s dplyr! The way you can handle data.frames is a dream.”

Pythonista: “But pandas has also Data.Frames. They are built to resemble their counterparts in R.”

Me: “That’s true. But they manage the functionality of plain R. Actually R has made several steps ahead with dplyr.”

But dplyr is built mainly for interactive data exploration. So it’s very easy to select, mutate, group and summarize your data.frame (or tibble). The reason is non-standard evaluation (NSE) (See more in Hadley Wickham’s book Advanced R. NSE occures when you use a column-name without any quoting.

But when it’s up to programming it get’s a little more complicated.

So let’s look at an example: