Customizing R Markdown reports

In this section, we will look at adding metadata such as a table of contents to the report, followed by introducing more options for changing the report style.

Adding a table of contents

When reading a report for the first time, a table of contents provides an overview of the report and thus helps readers quickly navigate the different sections of the report.

To add a table of contents, we can append a colon to the html_document field in the YAML header and set toc: true as a separate line with one more indentation than the html_document field. This is shown in the following code snippet:

---
title: "Financial analysis"
output:
    html_document:
        toc: true
date: "2022-10-12"
author: "Liu Peng"
---

Knitting the document with these commands produces Figure 6.29, where a table of contents is now displayed at the top of the report. Note that when...