[r] Insert picture/table in R Markdown

So I want to insert a table AND a picture into R Markdown. In regular word document I can just easily insert a table (5 rows by 2 columns), and for the picture just copy and paste.

1. How do I insert a 5 row by 2 column table (and also type stuff into them)(and also adjust the table in terms of the 2nd column being wider than the first)?

2. How do I insert a picture? From my understanding, I should first save the picture as a png, then reference it into my document. Also, I want to automatically adjust the picture to the report, like not taking up more than a page, or less than a page.(Is there a way for me to adjust the size of the picture to my liking)?

3. If anyone knows anything cool/formatting about R Markdown could you also let me know? I know that # makes a big title for a paragraph, and ** ** bolds things. Thats about all I know though!

In March I made a deck presentation in slidify, Rmarkdown with impress.js which is a cool 3D framework. My index.Rmdheader looks like

---
title       : French TER (regional train) monthly regularity
subtitle    : since January 2013
author      : brigasnuncamais
job         : Business Intelligence / Data Scientist consultant
framework   : impressjs     # {io2012, html5slides, shower, dzslides, ...}
highlighter : highlight.js  # {highlight.js, prettify, highlight}
hitheme     : tomorrow      # 
widgets     : []            # {mathjax, quiz, bootstrap}
mode        : selfcontained # {standalone, draft}
knit        : slidify::knit2slides

subdirs are:

/assets /css    /impress-demo.css
        /fig    /unnamed-chunk-1-1.png (generated by included R code)
        /img    /SS850452.png (my image used as background)
        /js     /impress.js
        /layouts/custbg.html # content:--- layout: slide --- {{{ slide.html }}}
        /libraries  /frameworks /impressjs
                                /io2012
                    /highlighters   /highlight.js
                                    /impress.js
index.Rmd

A slide with image in background code snippet would be in my .Rmd:

<div id="bg">
  <img src="assets/img/SS850452.png" alt="">
</div>  

Some issues appeared since I last worked on it (photos are no more in background, text it too large on my R plot) but it works fine on my local. Troubles come when I run it on RPubs.

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

When it comes to inserting a picture, r2evans's suggestion of ![Caption for the picture.](/path/to/image.png) can be problematic if PDF output is required.

The knitr function include_graphics knitr::include_graphics('/path/to/image.png') is a more portable alternative that will generate, on your behalf, the markdown that is most appropriate to the output format that you are generating.