xaringan

Wonderful slides generating package: xaringan!

I got a great opportunity last year meeting with Yihui in person. I actually did a short interview with him, which I really found how wise and interesting Yihui can be (till now I am still impressed by his sense of ??? humor? I highly doubt I can use my limited vacabulory to accurately describe his personalty). As my dear advisor Dr. Liu said, “他是一个非常有意思的人”. I started reading his blog like a year ago, and I have enjoyed it.

Ok, I am kinda off the topic of this blog. Let’s go back to xaringan. According to Yihui, the name xaringan was derived from Sharingan where the pronounciations of X and SH are the same in Chinese and a great presentation could ‘hypnotize’ audience which is the same as the power of Sharingan. Although I am not a big fan of the Japanese anime Naruto, I liked Sharingan a lot, since it is a powerful Jutsu (術?忍术？) and looks cool :).

Personally, the reason why I think xaringan is better than beamer is it is more flexible and user-friendly. We could use xaringan to generate many well formatted, customized slides in HTML format (I just love HTML format reports/slides). It is so easy to read, pretty and able to include interactive contents. I know beamer slides is very formal and professional for acedemic conference. But even for acedemic conference, we could still use xaringan. Besides that, I do not see any other occasions that xaringan is not suiable.

If you are also interested in using xaringan to generate slides, I highly recommend you to read xaringan’s github page and Yihui’s introduction slides, which is also made by xaringan.