change the title color Rmd file

Question

I am trying to change the color of the title in an Rmd file that generates a Pdf

I tried this (with and without quotes):

---
title: "\textcolor{blue}{This title is blue}"
output:
  pdf_document:
  latex_engine: xelatex
---

# 1. TITLE 1

## 1.1 Subtitle

which gives this kind of error:

Error: Failed to compile test_font.tex.`

And then I tried this:

---
title: <div class="blue">This title is blue</div>
output:
  pdf_document:
  latex_engine: xelatex
---

# 1. TITLE 1

## 1.1 Subtitle

which doesn't change the color

Any advice? Thanks!

Answer 1

I found a way to change the color of titles of PDFs compiled from RMarkdown files by doing the following. This process does not require any manual modification of intermediate TeX files.

I have a header file that contains LaTeX code to import the color package and define some custom colors, it is named header.tex.

\usepackage{color}
\definecolor{NavyBlue}{RGB}{0,112,192}

The YAML section of my RMarkdown file contains the following lines in the ouput section.

output: 
  pdf_document:
    includes:
      in_header: header.tex
    keep_tex: true
    toc: false

And the title line is the following.

title: \textcolor{NavyBlue}{`r paste0('Report - ', params$Location)`}

The resulting title looks like this.

If you are using TinyTeX you should not need to worry about downloading any packages.