R, Knitr, and LaTeX to generate PDFs

[tonijung]

Hi

This is more of an enhancement request than issue. I had set up for my advisor this workflow using RStudio that I was hoping to be able to replicate using RCloud.

We had .Rnw files that imported a few .csv from Google Docs, did computations in R and wrote narrative in Tex. RCloud then was able to knit the .Rnw file into a PDF which was then emailed to students.

I had played around at work (I'm in AT&T E&LA) but it doesn't seem like I can generate PDFs since .Rnw and .Tex are not supported in RCloud yet.

[gordonwoodhull]

Hi @tonijung! Thanks for the suggestion.

I doubt that we are going to support .Rnw, since our primary output is HTML and AFAICT PDF is the only output for .Rnw. It's hard for me to imagine what a cell would do if its output is PDF - would it produce little PDF fragments for each cell?

We do, however, support RMarkdown (.Rmd), and outputting from there to PDF is pretty simple (although we don't yet have a built-in command to build the whole document #1320). I realize that the formatting in Markdown is not nearly as sophisticated as in LaTeX.