I&#39;m trying to come up with a good system for generating slides and accompanying handouts. The ideal system would have the following properties:

* beautiful in both presentation (PDF/HTML) and handout (PDF) layouts (handouts should have room for taking notes)
* embedded R chunks, figures, other JPG/PNG pictures, etc.
* easy to compose
* build using command-line tools
* bibliography support
* `pandoc` slide separator format (automatically generate a new slide after headers of a specified level) is preferred
* I can live with a little bit of additional processing (e.g. via `sed`), but would prefer not to write a huge infrastructure
* **two-column layouts**: there is a [SO post on how to get multi-column slides from pandoc](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15142134/slides-with-columns-in-pandoc), but it is LaTeX- rather than HTML-oriented.
* ability to adjust sizes of embedded images (other than R-generated figures) and column widths on the fly

Here&#39;s what I&#39;ve discovered so far about the various options:
 
* *Slidify*: 
    * doesn&#39;t do `pandoc` slide separator format, although [there is a workaround](https://github.com/ramnathv/slidify/issues/15‎)
	* the suggestion for creating handouts is to print to PDF; I&#39;d like to leave room for notes etc. (I could probably figure out a way to do that using something like [PDFtk](http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/) or `psnup` ...)
* `RStudio` presentations (`.Rpres` files): 
    * does lots of things nicely, including multi-columns with specified widths
    * doesn&#39;t support `pandoc` slide separator format 
    * I can&#39;t figure out what&#39;s going on under the hood. There is [RStudio documentation](http://www.rstudio.com/ide/docs/r_markdown) that describes the translation process for regular HTML, but it doesn&#39;t seem to cover the R presentation format (which isn&#39;t quite the same). (I have previously invested some effort in [figuring out how to get RStudio-like output via pandoc](http://ms.mcmaster.ca/~bolker/misc/pandoc_diffs.html) ...), which means I can&#39;t generate slides etc. from the command line.
* [RStudio&#39;s Development Version](http://www.rstudio.com/ide/download/preview) (as of March 2014) comes bundled with Pandoc and version 2 of `rmarkdown`. It addresses many of the above issues with the `.Rpres` format.
* `pandoc`: may be the only markdown-translator that has features such as footnotes, bibliography support, etc..  I can also use `pandoc` to generate LaTeX using the [tufte-handout class](http://code.google.com/p/tufte-latex/), which meets my criteria of beauty. 
    * Unfortunately, it seems not to have built-in two-column format support. [Yihui Xie&#39;s HTML5 example](http://yihui.name/knitr/demo/slides/) doesn&#39;t show any two-column examples, and it claims (on slide 5) that clicking the &quot;Knit HTML&quot; button in RStudio is equivalent to `pandoc -s -S -i -t dzslides --mathjax knitr-slides.md -o knitr-slides.html`, but it doesn&#39;t seem to be ...
* LaTeX/beamer: I could simply compose in `Rnw` (knitr-dialect Sweave) rather than R markdown to begin with.  This would give me ultimate flexibility ...
    * despite many years of LaTeX use I do find LaTeX composition more of a pain than markdown composition.  

After all that, my specific question is: *what&#39;s the best (easiest) way to generate a two-column layout for HTML output*?

Any other advice will also be appreciated.



All Slidify Solutions on Gang of Coders

Total of 1 Slidify Solutions

two-column layouts in RStudio presentations/slidify/pandoc