Can I use Rstudio to translate .Rmd to LaTeX directly without pandoc?

Question

Playable example (if you have rstudio):

• File | New | R markdown
• Knitting in html, saving as test :

Go to the working directory

• In the terminal (with pandoc installed) enter

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

(results are inserted here )

• Convert to pdf using pdflatex (see result here )

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

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

The results are good, but there seem to be many steps, given that knitr includes sweave. It should be able to directly convert from .Rmd to .tex or .pdf. Right?

Answer 1

This is described at http://www.rstudio.com/ide/docs/authoring/markdown_custom_rendering ; you must add .Rprofile to your directory, for example:

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

Some changes may be required. Too bad the same does not work with spin due to an error in RStudio.

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