[r] Insert picture/table in R Markdown

Update: since the answer from @r2evans, it is much easier to insert images into R Markdown and control the size of the image.

Images

The bookdown book does a great job of explaining that the best way to include images is by using include_graphics(). For example, a full width image can be printed with a caption below:

```{r pressure, echo=FALSE, fig.cap="A caption", out.width = '100%'}
knitr::include_graphics("temp.png")
```

The reason this method is better than the pandoc approach ![your image](path/to/image):

• It automatically changes the command based on the output format (HTML/PDF/Word)
• The same syntax can be used to the size of the plot (fig.width), the output width in the report (out.width), add captions (fig.cap) etc.
• It uses the best graphical devices for the output. This means PDF images remain high resolution.

Tables

knitr::kable() is the best way to include tables in an R Markdown report as explained fully here. Again, this function is intelligent in automatically selecting the correct formatting for the output selected.

```{r table}
knitr::kable(mtcars[1:5,, 1:5], caption = "A table caption")
```

If you want to make your own simple tables in R Markdown and are using R Studio, you can check out the insert_table package. It provides a tidy graphical interface for making tables.

Achieving custom styling of the table column width is beyond the scope of knitr, but the kableExtra package has been written to help achieve this: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/kableExtra/index.html

Style Tips

The R Markdown cheat sheet is still the best place to learn about most the basic syntax you can use.

If you are looking for potential extensions to the formatting, the bookdown package is also worth exploring. It provides the ability to cross-reference, create special headers and more: https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/markdown-extensions-by-bookdown.html