How to customize a css for markdown + knitr in Rstudio? - css

Question

I want to change the default style sheet for the KnitHTML function in RStudio 0.96.331.
I follow the instructions in this post.
First I copy past the original markdown.css from here . As a test I change the first few lines from:
body, td {
font-family: sans-serif;
background-color: white;
font-size: 12px;
margin: 8px;
}
to red background
body, td {
font-family: sans-serif;
background-color: red;
font-size: 12px;
margin: 8px;
}
and save it as mymd.css in my working directory. I then create a style.R file as follows:
options(rstudio.markdownToHTML =
function(inputFile, outputFile) {
require(markdown)
markdownToHTML(inputFile, outputFile, stylesheet='mymd.css')
}
)
Finally, I source the style.R file by clicking source and then go back to the .Rmd file and knit it to HTML. I get the red background, but the math is not compiled e.g. $\alpha$

Answer 1

AFAIK，MathJax service was down yesterday due to the GoDaddy outage. Can you confirm the math problem was not due to that?

Answer 2

So I may have a work around for you, but it involves using pandoc:
Suppose your style sheet is called style.css
Source the following code:
options(rstudio.markdownToHTML = function(inputFile, outputFile) {
system(paste("pandoc -c style.css", shQuote(inputFile),
"-o", shQuote(outputFile)))
}
)

Answer 3

This is maybe a new feature that was not available at the time the question was asked. However, there is a simple solution I found here:
https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/html-document.html#appearance-and-style
In the preamble of your .Rmd, just write this:
---
title: "Your title"
output:
html_document:
css: yourstylefile.css
---