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rr-markdownbeamer

Add left sidebar to Beamer Presentation in R Markdown

I am using R Markdown to knit to a Beamer presentation.

My presentation includes a table of contents. I would like the TOC to be visible as a left-handed sidebar throughout the presentation. Preferentially I would like the current section to be highlighted.

Is it possible to do this directly in R, or do I have to wrangle with intermediate Latex output? I think it may be possible with a Pandoc template, if so, how do I get to this solution?

Solution

  • You can set the outertheme: sidebar option in the YAML. This gets passed to the pandoc template intro \useoutertheme{} option. You can see the pandoc template used here if you are interested to see what other things can be set by the frontmatter.

    Here is a minimal example:

    ---
title: "Habits"
author: John Doe
date: March 22, 2005
output: beamer_presentation
outertheme: sidebar
---

# In the morning

## Getting up

- Turn off alarm
- Get out of bed

## Breakfast

- Eat eggs
- Drink coffee

# In the evening

## Dinner

- Eat spaghetti
- Drink wine

----

    As you can see from the output, the sidebar changes the highlighting depending on the page:

    enter image description here

    If you want to show the title of each slide on the sidebar (i.e. Breakfast, In the evening), you have to alter the slide_level variable in the YAMl:

    output: 
  beamer_presentation:
    slide_level: 3