Is it possible to use Rstudio to translate from .Rmd to LaTeX directly without pandoc?

Question

Reproducible example (if you have rstudio):

• File | New | R Markdown
• Knit to html, saving as test :

Navigate to working directory

• In a terminal (with pandoc installed) type

  pandoc -s test.md -t latex -o test.tex

(results pasted here)

• Convert to pdf with pdflatex (see result here)

Or skip the tex stage by going directly to .pdf:

pandoc -s test.md -t latex -o test2.pdf

The results are good, but seem like a lot of steps given that knitr incorporates sweave. It should be able to convert from .Rmd to .tex or .pdf directly. Right?

Clangor

Of course "is it possible". Has something written such a new converter which skips one or more steps of an existing tool pipeline? Unsure, to unlikely. – Whoop

Thanks for this - maybe a feature request for RStudio developers: add a "knit to LaTeX" button to reduce fiddle. Seems compatible with their philosophy rstudio.com/training/philosophy.html – Clangor

Answer 1

This is documented in http://www.rstudio.com/ide/docs/authoring/markdown_custom_rendering; you should add an .Rprofile to your directory, for example:

options(rstudio.markdownToHTML = 
  function(inputFile, outputFile) {      
    system(paste("pandoc", shQuote(inputFile), "-o", shQuote(outputFile)))
  }
)  

Some modifications might be necessary. Too bad the same does not work with spin because of a bug in RStudio.

http://support.rstudio.org/help/discussions/problems/4128-spin-and-rprofile

Thionate

this is a nice answer. It seems to do what the OP wanted, although it's not technically "without pandoc" (e.g. if someone who hadn't/couldn't install[ed] pandoc wanted to do this), rather it's "without an additional annoying manual invocation of pandoc". – Unhouse

Answer 2

For anyone who stumbles upon this old question, there is now (has been for a while) a keep_tex: true parameter that preserves the intermediate .tex file created by Pandoc. Call it like this in the YAML header:

---
output:
  pdf_document:
    keep_tex: true
---

Clemente