Text

The Text element is used for displaying plain, word-wrapped text, laid out as paragraphs. Unlike Preformatted, which preserves whitespace and renders in a monospaced font, Text reflows its content like ordinary prose — making it suited to narrative summaries, interpretive statements, or other explanatory output that isn’t tabular.

Content is authored as Markdown, and split into paragraphs on a blank line (i.e. two consecutive newline characters, \n\n), with each paragraph word-wrapped to fit the results panel. The following Markdown formatting is supported:

Formatting	Markdown
Bold	`bold`
Italic	`italic`
Strikethrough	`~~strikethrough~~`
Links	`[text](url)`
Lists	`- item` / `1. item`
Subscript / superscript	`<sub>`, `<sup>` tags (no Markdown syntax exists for these)

Other Markdown constructs — headings, blockquotes, code blocks, tables, images — aren’t supported. They’re stripped down to plain paragraphs rather than rendered with their own semantics, so don’t rely on them for structure.

Because * and _ are Markdown syntax, take care with significance markers and other stats notation that use asterisks (e.g. 5.2*, p < .001**) — an odd number of unescaped asterisks can trigger italics, and an even number can trigger bold, swallowing everything up to the next one. Escape each asterisk with a backslash (\*) to render it literally:

text$setContent("Effect size: 5.2\\*\\* (p < .001)")

Warning

HTML character entities (e.g. —,  , —) are deliberately not decoded, even though the content is parsed as Markdown — they render literally (e.g. as —) rather than as the character they represent. Use the actual character (e.g. —) in your content instead. If you’re writing that character directly into an .R file and intend to submit your module to CRAN, use a Unicode escape (e.g. "\u2014") rather than a literal non-ASCII character in your source, since CRAN checks flag those.

Available in jamovi 28.3 and newer. Declare this in your module’s 0000.yaml using minApp, so jamovi prevents installation on older versions that don’t support it:

minApp: 28.3.0

YAML Properties

Property	Type	Description
`name`	string	The unique name of the element.
`type`	string	Must be `Text`.
`title`	string	(optional) The title displayed in the results panel.
`content`	string	(optional) The initial text content.
`visible`	boolean or string	(optional) Whether the element is visible by default. Defaults to `true`.
`clearWith`	array	(optional) A list of option names that clear this element when changed. Defaults to `*` (all options).
`refs`	array or string	(optional) References to cite alongside this element.

Methods

setStatus(status)

sets the element’s status, should be one of 'complete', 'error', 'inited', 'running'.

setVisible(visible=TRUE)

overrides the element’s default visibility.

setTitle(title)

sets the element’s title.

setError(message)

sets the element’s status to ‘error’, and assigns the error message.

setState(object)

sets the state object on the element.

setContent(value)

sets the text content of the element. value should be a string; if it isn’t a character vector, it’s coerced with capture.output() first.

Examples

1. Define the Text element in YAML

A Text element is defined in the .r.yaml file:

- name: summary
  title: Summary
  type: Text

2. Set Content in R

In the .run() function, set the element’s content as a plain string:

.run = function() {
    # Access a Text element named 'summary'
    text <- self$results$summary

    n <- nrow(self$data)

    text$setContent(paste0(
        "The sample consisted of ", n, " observations. ",
        "No significant outliers were detected."
    ))
}

Blank lines separate paragraphs:

text$setContent(
    "The first paragraph.\n\nThe second paragraph."
)

3. Markdown Formatting

text$setContent(paste0(
    "The effect was **statistically significant** ",
    "(see [the appendix](https://example.com/appendix) for details):\n\n",
    "- Factor A: *p* < .001\n",
    "- Factor B: *p* = .045\n"
))