Colin and Jared were talking about the LaTeX headache on Twitter. I was surprised because the problem of missing LaTeX packages was still bothering them. In particular, the inconsolata package had been bundled into TinyTeX. Why did they still run into that problem?
It is understandable that it could be too scary for Jared to switch a LaTeX distribution such as MiKTeX, which had been working well most of the time. I had tested on his computer that when MiKTeX failed to work, TinyTeX worked fine. Anyway, he said that he would install TinyTeX after he orders his new computer. That was Feb 2020.
A random challenge
Seven months later, there came the aforementioned LaTeX headache on Twitter. On that day, it happened that I was considering a 4-year old xaringan feature request that he was also interested in, i.e., self-contained xaringan slides. I thought it would be fun to encourage Jared to order the new computer and try TinyTeX, so I hinted to him that I could probably have implemented the xaringan feature before he orders the new computer. Jared said:
If that (ordering the new computer) gets me self-contained slides, I’ll order it right now.
I’d love to compete with his shipping carrier and see whether self-contained xaringan slides or his new computer would arrive first. I might have lost the game without Susan VanderPlas’s PR #207.
The technical difficulty
Thanks to Pandoc, most HTML output formats in R Markdown support the self-contained mode. That is, all external resources in the HTML file, such as images, can be embedded right in the HTML file as base64 data. Why is xaringan different?
It is because xaringan does not fully use Pandoc to render slides. More precisely speaking, the body of the slides is not rendered by Pandoc, but by the JS library remark.js. That means external resources in the body cannot be embedded, except for plots automatically generated in R code chunks (I had dealt with this special case but not other cases).
To fix this problem, I’d have to parse the body, which is Markdown text, by
myself, and embed the external resources found. In theory, this cannot be done
completely reliably in R, because I cannot access remark.js’s Markdown parser in
R, but a few regular expressions (I know you are frowning upon this now) can
deal with the most common cases, such as ![]() and <img src="" />. That is
what Susan did when we met at the 2019 Uncoast
Unconference.
The speed trick
Actually, finding out external resources and encoding them as base64 data in the body is not enough. The problem is still due to the fact that the Markdown body is rendered to HTML by remark.js in real time in the web browser. Having too much base64 data (which is usually big) will make it extremely slow for remark.js to render the slides. Jared once told me that it could take five minutes to render his slides after he opens the HTML file in the web browser. That is definitely unbearable.
My solution to this problem was to store the base64 data outside of the Markdown body, and add them back to the body after remark.js has finished rendering Markdown, so remark.js actually never sees the humongous base64 strings. This has made it much faster for remark.js to render the slides, since it no longer has to read or render megabytes of Markdown text.
The live preview
Base64 encoding often takes nontrivial time, therefore I have turned off the
self-contained mode during the live preview of slides (i.e., the Infinite Moon
Reader). You will see a message in the R console
telling you that the self-contained mode has been temporarily turned off when
you live preview slides with self_contained: true.
To get fully self-contained slides, you have to click the Knit button in RStudio
to compile the Rmd document, or equivalently, call the function
rmarkdown::render().
Conclusion
Finally, you can have a single self-contained .html file for your xaringan
presentation that you can freely upload to any web server or send by email, and
it will not require Internet connection to read.
---
output:
xaringan::moon_reader:
self_contained: true
---
Once again, many thanks to Susan for the initial effort, and Jared for the trust and persistence!