Exact usage for hidden indent option with knitr

Question

I'm trying to render rmarkdown to markdown and implement the example for the hidden indentation option from Yihui Xie's documentation for knitr:

There is a hidden option indent which stores the possible leading white spaces of the chunk, e.g. for the chunk below, indent is a character string of two spaces:

  ```{r}
  rnorm(10)
  ```

Which I interpret to mean simply add two spaces before each line in the code as I entered above. However, when I knit the document the code block is not recognized because of the leading spaces. Obviously I am not understanding the correct way to implement this option.

I want to do this because I'm writing a book with Leanpub and I need to render rmarkdown to markdown. The default four spaces leads to a code block with Leanpub's markdown interpreter, but doesn't put code and output in nice boxes the way rmarkdown/knitr users are used to. If I can control the whitespace in markdown, I will have more control over how my code and output looks. If they took html files as a normal part of their workflow it would be easy, but this is not fully supported.

ace_prof ace_prof · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-29T20:15:08

The indent option is literally a option to the code chunk. As in

 ```{r,  indent=" "}
 code
 ```

adds one character space before the code in the rendered document. Seems obvious now. However, this wasn't really a solution to my overarching problem.

I did find a simple solution for the rmarkdown to markdown problem though. Simply place escaped tilde's around the code block.

In rmarkdown

 \~\~\~\~\~ 
 ```{r}
  code
 ```
 \~\~\~\~\~

renders as

 ~~~~~ 

 code

 executed code

 ~~~~~

in the markdown document. Then Leanpub's markdown puts horizontal lines before and after the code. Not exactly the box I was looking for but it works.

Exact usage for hidden indent option with knitr

1 Answers