How make 2 column layout in R markdown when rendering pdf?

Question

When rendering html documents with rmarkdown there are ways to make a two columns layout, e.g. here

Is there an easy way to render a pdf document with two column layout? Is there an example code somewhere?

Answer 1

New pandoc version have made this easier since my original answer. According to pandoc's manual, you can now specify classoptions directly in the YAML front matter:

---
classoption:
- twocolumn
---

The new div notation also allows for inserting two column sections anywhere in the document, working for most formats

:::::::::::::: {.columns}
::: {.column width="40%"}

contents...

:::
::: {.column width="60%"}

contents...

:::
::::::::::::::

Original answer

You can use the article option twocolumn to format the whole document in two columns. Add this to your yaml front matter:

---
output: 
  pdf_document:
    pandoc_args: [
      "-V", "classoption=twocolumn"
    ]
---