litedown: A Lightweight Version of R Markdown

litedown turns Markdown and R Markdown into HTML and LaTeX/PDF, with no knitr and no Pandoc. It imports only one R package, xfun, and renders Markdown with a bundled and patched copy of the cmark-gfm C library.

• Computing: run code chunks and inline code (`{r} x`) in R, or in other languages via engines such as JavaScript, CSS, Mermaid, and shell commands. Chunk options control code, text output, figures, tables, caching, and even the order of execution.

• Markdown: GFM plus math, footnotes, superscripts/subscripts, raw HTML/LaTeX blocks, element attributes, cross-references, citations, and callouts.

• Output: single HTML documents (with resources embedded if you want), LaTeX and PDF, and lightweight HTML articles, slides, and paged HTML (for print), styled with small vanilla CSS/JS files from lite.js.

• Projects: books and websites from a directory of documents with a _litedown.yml, including websites for R packages via pkg_site().

• Workflow: roam() previews and renders documents in a browser, with live reload, so you do not need a Knit button.

1 Installation

install.packages('litedown')

The development version is available from r-universe:

install.packages('litedown', repos = 'https://yihui.r-universe.dev')

2 A quick look

Save this as hello.Rmd:

---
title: Hello litedown
output: html
---

```{r}
x = 2
```

The area of a circle with radius `{r} x` is `{r} pi * x^2`.

Then render it:

litedown::fuse('hello.Rmd')  # hello.Rmd -> hello.html
litedown::roam()             # or preview and render in a browser

3 Main functions

Function	What it does
fuse()	executes code in an R Markdown document, then renders it via mark()
mark()	renders Markdown to HTML, LaTeX, etc.
fiss()	extracts code from a document (like knitr::purl())
roam()	previews and renders documents in a browser
fuse_book(), fuse_site(), pkg_site()	build books, websites, and package sites

If you do not compute in your documents, mark() alone is enough.

4 Learn more

Read the book, litedown: R Markdown Reimagined, which also covers differences from knitr. Browse examples of chunk options and engines.

5 Scope

We want to limit the scope of this package. Most planned features have been (re-)implemented so far, such as reports, slides, books, websites (including package sites), and paged HTML documents, etc. See the set \(R\) below:

$$\mathrm{litedown} = \min{\{R\}} + \{D_i\} - \{D_e\} + \{J\}$$

• \(R\) = knitr + evaluate + rmarkdown + bookdown + blogdown + pagedown + pkgdown + xaringan + tufte + distill + htmlwidgets

• \(D_i\) = (internal dependencies) xfun

• \(D_e\) = (external dependencies) Pandoc + Bootstrap + jQuery + GitBook + Hugo + paged.js + remark.js + tufte.css + distill.js/.css + …

• \(J\) = Lightweight vanilla JavaScript/CSS

Please feel free to file feature requests anyway, but we may be a little conservative when considering them (we will take votes into consideration, so please upvote features you like).

6 License

The litedown package is licensed under MIT.

Appendix

To cite the package litedown in publications, please use:

Xie Y (2026). litedown: A Lightweight Version of R Markdown. R package version 0.11.14, https://github.com/yihui/litedown.

@Manual{,
  title = {litedown: A Lightweight Version of R Markdown},
  author = {Yihui Xie},
  year = {2026},
  note = {R package version 0.11.14},
  url = {https://github.com/yihui/litedown},
}