Rstudio rmarkdown: both portrait and landscape layout in a single PDF

knitrpdfrr-markdownrstudio

I wonder how to use rmarkdown to generate a pdf which has both portrait and landscape layout in the same document. If there is a pure rmarkdown option that would be even better than using latex.

Here's a small, reproducible example. First, rendering this .Rmd in RStudio (press Knit PDF button) results in a pdf with all pages in landscape layout:

---
title: "All pages landscape"
output: pdf_document
classoption: landscape
---

```{r}
summary(cars)
```

\newpage
```{r}
summary(cars)
```

Then an attempt to create a document which mixes portrait and landscape layout. The basic setup in the YAML is done according to the 'Includes' section here. The in_header file 'header.tex' only contains \usepackage{lscape}, a package suggested for knitr landscape layout here. The .tex file is in the same directory as the .Rmd file. 

---
title: "Mixing portrait and landscape"
output:
    pdf_document:
        includes:
            in_header: header.tex
---

Portrait:
```{r}
summary(cars)
```

\newpage
\begin{landscape}
Landscape:
```{r}
summary(cars)
```
\end{landscape}

\newpage
More portrait:
```{r}
summary(cars)
```

However, this code results in an error:

# ! You can't use `macro parameter character #' in horizontal mode.
# l.116 #

# pandoc.exe: Error producing PDF from TeX source
# Error: pandoc document conversion failed with error 43

Any help is much appreciated.

Best Answer

So, pandoc does not parse the content of latex environments, but you can fool it by redefining the commands in your header.tex file:

\usepackage{lscape}
\newcommand{\blandscape}{\begin{landscape}}
\newcommand{\elandscape}{\end{landscape}}

Thus, here \begin{landscape} is redefined to \blandscape, and \end{landscape} to \elandscape. Using those newly defined command in the .Rmd file seems to work:

---
title: "Mixing portrait and landscape"
output:
    pdf_document:
        includes:
            in_header: header.tex 
---

Portrait
```{r}
summary(cars)
```

\newpage
\blandscape
Landscape
```{r}
summary(cars)
```
\elandscape

\newpage
More portrait
```{r}
summary(cars)
```
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