R is for
Authoring!!

OOH Session #138…
Distill  

Open Office Hours
(August 05, 2026)

  • Recap session #137
  • Today’s topic(s):
  • Shared problem-solving






Reminder – check it out!!

Fantastic resource!!

Recap of Session
#137:

Word

Pros

  • Ubiquity
  • Bullets, callouts, code echoing, table of contents
  • Sharp base format
  • End–user customization*

Cons

  • Style (strongest control with templates)
  • Layout (see above)
  • No interactivity support
  • End–user customization*

Today…

Distill1

HTML output format for R Markdown documents – optimized for scientific and technical web–based communication

Distill.pub emphasized moving beyond static PDFs. It offered prizes for outstanding explanatory work and aimed to legitimize non-traditional research artifacts (e.g., interactive articles).


The name and core design come from the Distill web framework, originally created for Distill.pub, an online scientific journal focused on machine learning (launched around 2016–2017).

& Session Info (August 05, 2026) Rendering:

R version 4.5.0 (2025-04-11 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19045)

Matrix products: default
  LAPACK version 3.12.1

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.utf8 
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.utf8   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.utf8
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.utf8    

time zone: America/Chicago
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] compiler_4.5.0    fastmap_1.2.0     cli_3.6.5         tools_4.5.0      
 [5] htmltools_0.5.9   otel_0.2.0        rstudioapi_0.18.0 yaml_2.3.12      
 [9] rmarkdown_2.31    knitr_1.51        jsonlite_2.0.0    xfun_0.57        
[13] digest_0.6.39     rlang_1.1.7       evaluate_1.0.5

Quarto version 1.9.37