Chapter 5 Formatting

We leave it to you to decide whether such features are worth your effort. To some degree, Markdown reflects the philosophy of Stoicism: the “natural world” consists of plain text, and you should not be controlled by the desire for (visual) pleasure. Anyway, this chapter offers some tips on how you can customize the appearance and styling of elements in an R Markdown document.

If you need a reminder in the basics of the Markdown language, the R Markdown cheatsheet at provides a good overview of the basic syntax.