[Tex/LaTex] R+LaTex to HTML5 better than pdf

beamerknitrr

I use R together with ggmap, ggplot2, Rstudio, knitr, and beamer to produce presentations in pdf. Soon I hope to have time to learn TikZ too. I have not moved to Markdown because I appreciate the layout-power of LaTex. My ambition is to minimize the time and work from I get new data (measurements from another city) to when I have the pdf to show to my audience. I have some time-saving logic implemented in the LaTex, like changing title of slides depending on if results are good or bad.

I want my slides to evolve from having just simple animations like adding one bullet of text at a time and animated gifs, to include interactive plots e.g. clicking on a map show some results from the clicked location. Possibly there are even more advanced ways of interaction to help explain difficult concepts. On the internet there are many impressive examples, for example using googleVis.

Some of the requirements I think many in my situation have:
– The data in the presentations is confidential (cannot be put on hosting-sites)
– It must be possible to look at the slides whithout being connected to internet
– It must be possible to email the presentations as attachment
– It must be possible to look at the presentations without installing other software than a web browser or Acrobat Reader

The Adobe pdf format is very strong, but I haven't been able to add interactiveness other than stepping forward or backward on a linear path. Is it now the time to learn how to output LaTex to a stronger format like HTML5?

Thanks to all contributors to tex.stackexchange! Sorry about long text.

/Chris

Best Answer

I don't know how to get interactive features from latex, but I hope some of these alternatives can be useful. You can make interactive plots using googleVis. If you decide to use Markdown, you can still get things which look nice with interactive features: http://www.r-bloggers.com/interactive-reports-in-r-with-knitr-and-rstudio/. If you want to keep everything in slide format, here is an example using googleVis, knitr, pandoc, and slidy: http://www.r-bloggers.com/interactive-html-presentation-with-r-googlevis-knitr-pandoc-and-slidy/. You can use Sweave in Beamer to get nice presentations dynamically created with chunks of R code.