How to change the font color?

Question

In RMarkdown is there a way to specify the font color?

There doesn\'t seem to be an option while browsing through the chunk options

Answer 1

The answer given at the link provided by @Ben Bolker:

Roses are <span style="color:red">red</span>, 
violets are <span style="color:blue">blue</span>.

does work if you select HTML (ioslides) as the output format.

However, it does not work if you select pdf (beamer) as output format. If you want to create a pdf, use LaTeX syntax:

    Roses are \textcolor{red}{red}, violets are \textcolor{blue}{blue}.

Answer 2

This seems to work very well in both output formats, pdf and html:

Roses are $\color{red}{\text{beautiful red}}$, 
violets are $\color{blue}{\text{lovely blue}}$.

Hope it helps.

Answer 3

I basically used Nicholas Hamilton's answer but because I used xtable and print, I had some problems with certain latex sequences being escaped. Namely, \\textcolor being transformed to $\backslash$textcolor. I was able to get it right by avoiding sanitizing in the following way:

```{r results='asis'}
tbl = data.frame(a = letters[1:10], b = 1:10 / 10)
tbl$b = ifelse(tbl$b < 0.5, colFmt(tbl$b, "red"), colFmt(tbl$b, "green"))
print(xtable(tbl), sanitize.text.function = identity)
```

I then had to go and manually sanitize a few characters like % but at least \textcolor was correctly applied. Of course, this could be avoided by expanding your own sanitize function.

Answer 4

An output-format agnostic solution would be to use the dedicated text_spec() function in the kableExtra package:

Roses are `r kableExtra::text_spec("red", color = "red")`,

violets are `r kableExtra::text_spec("blue", color = "blue")`

Answer 5

I create a function like this:

#Color Format
colFmt = function(x,color){
  outputFormat = knitr::opts_knit$get("rmarkdown.pandoc.to")
  if(outputFormat == 'latex')
    paste("\\textcolor{",color,"}{",x,"}",sep="")
  else if(outputFormat == 'html')
    paste("<font color='",color,"'>",x,"</font>",sep="")
  else
    x
}

Then you can use it inline like this:`r colFmt("MY RED TEXT",'red')`, and colored text will be rendered regardless of whether working on latex or HTML document.

Answer 6

For PDF and HTML, to get colored text which you can modify with markdown highlighting : see the rmarkdown book. Pandoc filter is the best choice.

For Microsoft word, you have to create first a Template_MS.docx with custom styles. Warning: create different styles for coloring paragraphs (paragraph style) and for colorings few words (character style). It is an option when you made a new style.

Add in th YAML:

---      
output:   
 word_document:   
    reference_docx: Template_MS.docx   
---   

And next:

For <span custom-style="Character1">few words</span> of colored text.

For paragraph.

<div custom-style="Paragraph1">Paragraph of colored text. Blabla. Blabla.</div>   

Nota Bene:
+ Do not use the same style for Paragraph and a few words, it is bugging.
+ If it is not working, check that your style is for paragraph ou character in MS.
+ If it is not working, install an updated version of pandoc.