How to add a page break in word document generated by RStudio & markdown

Question

I writing a Word document with R markdown in R Studio. I can get many things, but at the moment I am not figuring out how can I get a page break. I have found solutions but

Answer 1

It is not an automated solution. But I have been adding the text '#####page break' to my markdown document. Then in MS Word using find-replace to replace the text "page break" with "^m" (manual page break).

Answer 2

You can use the R package worded. This avoids the need for a template word file. See https://github.com/davidgohel/worded.

The output parameter needs to be set to worded::rdocx_document and you need to call library(worded).

---
date: "2018-03-27"
author: "David Gohel"
title: "Document title"
output: 
  worded::rdocx_document
---

```{r setup, include=FALSE}
library(worded)
```

You can then add <!---CHUNK_PAGEBREAK---> to your document whenever you want a page break.

The package allows various word formatting options using a similar mechanism.

Answer 3

When updating to R 4.0.0, the <!---CHUNK_PAGEBREAK---> solution was not working any more for me.

Instead I could use the run_pagebreak() function from the officer package, still in combination with the officedown package:

---
output: word_document
---

```{r settings}
library(officedown)
library(officer)
```

Hello world on page 1

`r run_pagebreak()`

Hello world on page 2

Answer 4

My solution is not very robust but can work for some of us. Assuming you need a page break before each level 1 title in your word document, I defined this in the format template used in the yaml field reference_docx: . In this document you modify the Heading 1 format (or equivalent) to insert a page break before the Title. Do not forget to start your template with the first docx rendered with knitr (pandoc) in RStudio.

Answer 5

Here is an R script that can be used as a pandoc filter to replace LaTeX breaks (\pagebreak) with word breaks, per @JAllen's answer above. With this you don't need to compile a pandoc script. Since you are working in R Markdown I assume one has R available in the system.

#!/usr/bin/env Rscript

json_in <- file('stdin', 'r')
lat_newp <- '{"t":"RawBlock","c":["latex","\\\\newpage"]}'
doc_newp <- '{"t":"RawBlock","c":["openxml","<w:p><w:r><w:br w:type=\\"page\\"/></w:r></w:p>"]}'
ast <- paste(readLines(json_in, warn=FALSE), collapse="\n")
ast <- gsub(lat_newp, doc_newp, ast, fixed=TRUE)
write(ast, "")

Save this as page-break-filter.R or something like that and make it executable by running chmod +x page-break-filter.R in the terminal.

Then include this filter the R Markdown YAML like so:

---
title: "Title
author: "Author"
output:  
  word_document:
    pandoc_args: [
      "--filter", "/path/to/page-break-filter.R"
    ]
---

Answer 6

What you are trying to do is force a "page break" or "new page" in a word document generated with Pandoc. I have found a way to do this in my environment but I'm not sure it will work in every environment.

My environment: * R-studio / Pandoc / MS-WORD starting with an "*.Rmd" file and generating a DOCX file.

In my RMD file the key idea is that i've created what acts like a TEMPLATE document (MyFormattingDocument.docx) and in that word document I tweak the STYLES for things like "Heading 1" and/or "Heading 2" and or "footnote" or whatever other predefined styles I want to tweak.

(SEE THIS: http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/word_document_format.html#style-reference ) for explanation of style reference and how to set the header information in your RMD file to specify a reference document.

SOOOO in my case... i tweak the "Heading 1" style in WORD to include a forced "Page Break Before" in the Paragraph formatting for "Heading 1". Exactly how you force every "Heading 1" to always "Page Break" is different in different versions of Microsoft WORD but if you follow the WORD documentation and modify the "Heading 1" style THEN every "Heading 1" will always have a pagebreak before it.

THEN... you save this template file in the some directory you're working from with the RMD file... and it is USED AS a template. THE CONTENTS of the file are ignored.... so don't worry... you can put sample text in this file and test that the formatting all works.... THE CONTENTS ARE IGNORED but the STYLES are USED in the new word document which will be built by the RMD file so.... then every "Heading 1" will have a break before it.

NOTE: You could obviously do the same with ANY style that has a one-to-one mapping from PANDOC MARKUP so you could instead just make all "Heading 3" or whatever.... just look at see in your RMD created DOCX what "STYLE" is being applied and then tweak that style even if you need to insert some "fake" lines with essentially blank content just for the purpose of forcing a style to appear in the DOCX