Rstudio rmarkdown: both portrait and landscape layout in a single PDF

Question

I wonder how to use rmarkdown to generate a pdf which has both portrait and landscape layout in the same document. If there is a pure rmarkdown option that would be even better than using latex.

Here's a small, reproducible example. First, rendering this .Rmd in RStudio (press Knit PDF button) results in a pdf with all pages in landscape layout:

--- title: "All pages landscape" output: pdf_document classoption: landscape ---  ```{r} summary(cars) ```  \newpage ```{r} summary(cars) ``` 

Then an attempt to create a document which mixes portrait and landscape layout. The basic setup in the YAML is done according to the 'Includes' section here. The in_header file 'header.tex' only contains \usepackage{lscape}, a package suggested for knitr landscape layout here. The .tex file is in the same directory as the .Rmd file.

--- title: "Mixing portrait and landscape" output:     pdf_document:         includes:             in_header: header.tex ---  Portrait: ```{r} summary(cars) ```  \newpage \begin{landscape} Landscape: ```{r} summary(cars) ``` \end{landscape}  \newpage More portrait: ```{r} summary(cars) ``` 

However, this code results in an error:

# ! You can't use `macro parameter character #' in horizontal mode. # l.116 #  # pandoc.exe: Error producing PDF from TeX source # Error: pandoc document conversion failed with error 43 

Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

So, pandoc does not parse the content of latex environments, but you can fool it by redefining the commands in your header.tex file:

\usepackage{lscape} \newcommand{\blandscape}{\begin{landscape}} \newcommand{\elandscape}{\end{landscape}} 

Thus, here \begin{landscape} is redefined to \blandscape, and \end{landscape} to \elandscape. Using those newly defined command in the .Rmd file seems to work:

--- title: "Mixing portrait and landscape" output:     pdf_document:         includes:             in_header: header.tex  ---  Portrait ```{r} summary(cars) ```  \newpage \blandscape Landscape ```{r} summary(cars) ``` \elandscape  \newpage More portrait ```{r} summary(cars) ``` 

Answer 2

Building upon previous solutions, the following solution does not require an auxiliary header.tex file. All contents are contained in the .Rmd file. The LaTeX commands are instead defined in a header-includes block in the YAML header. More info can be found here.

Also, I noticed that using the lscape LaTeX package rotates the contents of a page, but not the PDF page itself. This is resolved using the pdflscape package.

--- title: "Mixing portrait and landscape WITHOUT a header.tex file" header-includes: - \usepackage{pdflscape} - \newcommand{\blandscape}{\begin{landscape}} - \newcommand{\elandscape}{\end{landscape}} output: pdf_document ---  Portrait ```{r} summary(cars) ```  \newpage \blandscape Landscape ```{r} summary(cars) ``` \elandscape  \newpage More portrait ```{r} summary(cars) ```