Vertically scrollable code with RStudio and xaringan

Question

I am currently preparing html slides for an R modelling workshop, for which I use the awesome xaringan package for R. It is based on remark.js. Compared to ioslides and slidy, it does much better suit my expectations. I am absolutely excited! One feature that I missed, are scrollable "long slides". Here I leave of course the "slides" paradigm towards a mix between slides and ordinary web pages, but I find this didactically attractive to explain complex content and code. This style worked well with slidy, and I found also some hints how to enable scrollable code in xaringan.

Here I use the following CSS (found in a related post at SO):

.scrollable {
  height: 80%;
  overflow-y: auto;
} 

and then in an RMarkdown code chunk something like:

.scrollable[
  
```{r}
foo <- function() {
  cat("nothing\n")
}

foo()
foo()
foo()
foo()
foo()
foo()
foo()
foo()
foo()
foo()

## some comments ...
# ...
foo()
```

]

Long slides

Here I mean web-pages that can be scrolled down, but still stay embeded in a slide show.

Code Example

An example with scrollable code within a slide is found here:

• Code: https://github.com/dynamic-R/hacking-limnology/blob/main/docs/test.Rmd
• Demo: https://dynamic-r.github.io/hacking-limnology/test.html#3

It works partly, but I am not yet completely satisfied:

• I would prefer true "long slides" instead of scrollable text.
• Instead of enclosing parts with .scrollable[] I would prefer a class for complete slides
• It works only with Chrome, Edge (and the Infinite Moon Reader of RStudio), but not with Firefox. Edit: absolute heigt works with Firefox (Thanks to comment of @Waldi)

The CSS approach was taken from a related post at SO, that contains also links to further approaches (partly with additional JavaScript), but I was not able to get them running.

The Question

Any ideas, how to:

• define a xaringan slide class with scrollable content or
• to define slides as true "long slides", i.e. long html pages

where "slide class with scrollable content" or a "long-slide" class may be defined like:

---
class: scrollable-slide

similar to:

---
layout: false
class: inverse, middle, center

found in https://github.com/yihui/xaringan/wiki/Slide-layouts

Answer 1

remark.js was not made with scrollable slides in mind, which means that it is not possible to implement scrolling without a major feature addition to remark.js or breaking certain remark.js features.

If you are willing to break some features, the easiest way I can think of to hack in scrollable slides is by altering the y-overflow of the .remark-slide-scaler class. All we have to do is add the following CSS:

.remark-slide-scaler {
    overflow-y: auto;
}

To include this CSS you can write it to a file, say scrollable.css, and include it in the xaringan config block like so:

title: "Scrollable slides"
output:
  xaringan::moon_reader:
    css: ["default", "scrollable.css"]

This CSS will add a scroll bar to all slides which have content that is longer than the slide itself.

Things that break

Scrolling through slides

By default remark.js allows you to scroll from one slide to the next or previous one. However, when we have a scrollbar on a slide, we would like to heve this behaviour disabled.

The proper way to solve this is to write implement some functionality in remark.js that disables and enables the default scrolling behaviour at appropriate times.

An easy way is to simply disable scrolling through slides. We can do so by adding scroll: false to the navigation block in our nature block of our xaringan config:

title: "Scrollable slides"
output:
  xaringan::moon_reader:
    css: ["default", "scrollable.css"]
    nature:
      navigation:
# Disable scrolling through slides to
# allow scrolling in slides
        scroll: false

Page numbers

Page numbers are positioned at the bottom of the slide frame, but stick to the bottom of the slide content. This means that when you scroll down your scrollable slide, the page number scrolls up as well.

To fix this properly, we would have to change how remark.js renders the content. A common solution is something like this, which involves having the main content in a separate container from the footer. This footer would contain the page numbers.

An easy solution is hiding the page numbers. We can do so by adding the following to our scrollable.css:

.remark-slide-number {
    display: none;
}

Cloning

remark.js has a feature called "cloning" which lets you have several instances of the slides opened, but all synced to the same page. So when one instance goes to the next slide, all other slides do so as well. This unfortunately does not work as expected for our scrolling slides. remark.js is not able to register how far the page has been scrolled down, so it cannot communicate that to its clones. This means that on one instance you may have scrolled down all the way, but the other instances will still be stuck at the top of the content. An easy solution is to simply not use this feature.

Printing (not tested)

I have not tested this, but I can imagine the scrolling slide mucking up printing. Either the content will get truncated, or the long page will get printed in its entire length, possibly overlapping other things on the page. An easy solution here is to simply not print the slides.

There may be more features, like printing, that may or may not break by hacking in scrolling slides.

Conclusion

To summarise, if you are able to live with limited functionality, you can hack in scrolling slides by first creating a file scrollable.css, containing:

.remark-slide-scaler {
    overflow-y: auto;
}

.remark-slide-number {
    display: none;
}

And secondly include scrollable.css as well as scroll: false in your xaringan config. I have included a sample slideset below to illustrate.

---
title: "Scrollable slides"
output:
  xaringan::moon_reader:
    css: ["default", "scrollable.css"]
    nature:
      navigation:
# Disable scrolling through slides to
# allow scrolling in slides
        scroll: false
---
class: center

# First a normal short slide

Some content here
---
class: scrollable-slide

# A

# long

# slide

# that

# requires

# scrolling

# on

# my

# system
---
# End slide

Other options

If you don't have that many slides that need to be long, you could opt to make a handout. If you make this with rmarkdown, it would make the source files of the handouts very similar to the source file of the slides, would allow for exporting to different formats (like html), and would let you use all of remark.js's features.

Another option, if you really need this and can make a good case why this is useful to others as well, would be to make a feature request at the remark.js GitHub page for scrollable slides.