Reduce file size of R Markdown HTML output

Question

If I create a very basic R Markdown file with no images or code and knit this HTML, I end up with an outputted file size that is more than 700kb in size. Is there any way to

Answer 1

The html_vignette format is perfect if you want a smaller file size. As described in the function documentation:

A HTML vignette is a lightweight alternative to html_document suitable for inclusion in packages to be released to CRAN. It reduces the size of a basic vignette from 100k to around 10k.

For your example:

---
title: "Hello world!"
output: rmarkdown::html_vignette
---

Nothing else to say, really.

Results in an output of 6kB:

You can read more about the package in the online documentation here.