Changing the maximum width of R markdown documents

Question

When I create an R Markdown file and knit HTML, the following is present:

<style type="text/css">
.main-container {
  max-width: 940px;
  margin-left: auto;
  margin-right: auto;
}

I would like to change the max-width attribute. How would I do that?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you are only making HTML output you can put

<style>
    body .main-container {
        max-width: 500px;
    }
</style>

at the beginning of the .Rmd file I put mine after the front matter.

Answer 2

There's no way to change that number specifically, but you can override it. Create your own style.css file in the same directory as your document, and give it some content:

body .main-container {
max-width: 500px;
}

Then reference that CSS file in your YAML front matter:

---
...
output:
  html_document:
    css: style.css
---