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?

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

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
---