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Add a MS Word Comment via Rmarkdown

Is there a way to add a MS Word "Comment" via a R markdown file? I'm using a reference_docx, and familiar with adding custom styles...but haven't figured out how to get a comment to show up on the side like this:

enter image description here

To clarify: I want to add a tag (or something?) to my plaintext Rmd file, so that when I "knit" the resulting MS Word doc has a rendered comment.

Solution

  • Actually, this is possible. Yes, Markdown (and RMarkdown) are for plain text writing, but they are translated using pandoc. So I googled this and found the following code, which works well:

    ---
title: "test"
output:
  word_document: default
---

This text contains a [This is the comment]{.comment-start id="0" author="Johannes G." date="2020-01-13T10:12:00Z"}comment.[]{.comment-end id="0"}.

    enter image description here

    This will create a bit of a mess when knitting to other formats, so you might want to think about using an R functions instead:

    ```{r echo=FALSE}
word_comment <- function(comment, highlight = "") {
  if (isTRUE(knitr:::pandoc_to() == "docx")) {
    paste0('[', comment, ']{.comment-start id="0" author="Johannes G."',
           'date="2020-01-13T10:12:00Z"}', highlight, '[]{.comment-end id="0"}')
  }
}
```

This text contains a `r word_comment("This is the comment", "comment.")`.

    The code can probably be improved but I couldn't find documentation for the chunk that creates the comment so this works well enough for the moment.