The R rgl package exports an HTML widget with the rglwidget() function, built using the htmlwidgets package. Often the data for this widget is quite large, and Pandoc and webshot2 choke on it.

I would like to try compressing the data when the HTML page is created, and uncompressing it in Javascript before display. I can see that there's a Javascript package pako that appears to do what I want, and it can be "browserified", but I can't see how to make it available to rglwidget(). Can anyone describe what's necessary?

Edited to add some more detail in response to a comment: This needs to happen on the server (or actually, even before the file gets to the server). htmlwidgets produces output in a Markdown document that is converted to HTML by Pandoc, and that step is failing because Pandoc chokes on the large JSON datasets. I'm not sure if it's just the size, or the complexity (I think Pandoc parses the JSON, and appears to blow up to a huge memory footprint before it crashes). I'm hoping that by using a base64 blob Pandoc will handle it better. webshot2 also has problems that may be the same.

2nd Edit: I've got some evidence that it's the size that matters, not the complexity. I used base64 encoding on the JSON to make it simpler (just one long string), but 33% bigger, and things were worse. So I'm back to thinking that compression would help.