This discussion at pandoc-discuss inspired me to create an alternative way of generating highly customizable scientific reports, with the best typographic features available, but that also allowed the incorporation of some clever design ideas from tufte-latex.

This is an attempt to reproduce some tufte features plus adding support for R code and graphic capabilities (I have scientific reports and books in mind), but allowing the writer to set linestretch and fonts for whatever s/he wants.

Fullwidth figures are not supported, however fullwidth verbatim code is. In order to get that effect one can enclose the code snippet between /fullwbegin /fullwend.

The two strongest points of this style is that it can be imported with mighty_make with:

make fetch THEME="https://github.com/lf-araujo/tuftish-pandoc"

It supports R code via pp. You can either add graphics from R code or R output directly into your documents much like knitr, but much better as all internationalisation from LaTeX is supported, together with the cross-reference support from pandoc-crossref.

The inspiration for doing this came from several places. First, from knitr, which is excellent for document production but is not the best tool to write in languages other than English. Second, for Duzin who created a tufte "wrapper" in pp for pandoc, and finally CDSoft, pp's maintainer, who was nice enough to include R in his preprocessing tool. So be aware that this tool needs pp installed.

This is an unfinished project, I am putting out in github so perhaps it can attract some forks. Note that I still have to finish the cover for the book version of this style, but overall it is an good style for scientific reports.