How to knit inline image that align to multiple lines of text using r-markdown?

Question

I want to knit a report such that the header is similar to the image below.

• the square at the very left is an icon
• rectangles are text

I encountered three problems currently

1. how to insert an icon with url (online image)?
2. how to format the icon so that it is inline with 3 rows of text
3. how to change the font size and line spacing between rows

please find the minimal reproducible example below (note that I have commented the online image because I don't know how to correctly code it)

---
output: pdf_document
geometry: margin=0.25in
classoption:
  - landscape
---

```{r, echo=FALSE, results='asis'}
for (i in unique(iris$Species)) {
  cat("\\newpage")
  # cat('\n![](https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/images/hex-rmarkdown.png)\n')
  cat("\n#", "Iris Species Summary", "\\hfill", paste0("Exhibit ", grep(i, unique(iris$Species)), ".1"))
  cat("\n##", i, "\\hfill", "(Gross)")
  cat("\n######", "(000's)", "\\hfill", as.character(Sys.Date()))
}
```

Answer 1

All your three questions can be solved by including html elements.

The RMarkdown is essentially a Markdown, you can include html elements in the file.

you can either use html by:

```{r echo=FALSE}
knitr::asis_output(htmltools::htmlPreserve("
<div>
    <div>block 2
    </div>
</div>
"))
```

Or

<!--html_preserve-->
<div>
    <div>block 3
    </div>
</div>
<!--/html_preserve-->

Then you can use the html to change the layout and font in the documents, basically you need to learn to write simple html code, not hard just a lot of googling.

Sorry for not write out the code for you with your examples, it should be straightforward. The reference is here, which is a closed GitHub issue: https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/issues/326.

Hope this helps.