How to convert R Markdown to PDF?

Question

I\'ve previously asked about the commands for converting R Markdown to HTML.

What is a good way to convert R Markdown files to PDF documents?

Answer 1

For an option that looks more like what you get when you print from a browser, wkhtmltopdf provides one option.

On Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf

And then the same command as for the pandoc example to get to the HTML:

RMDFILE=example-r-markdown  
Rscript -e "require(knitr); require(markdown); knit('$RMDFILE.rmd', '$RMDFILE.md'); markdownToHTML('$RMDFILE.md', '$RMDFILE.html', options=c('use_xhml'))"

and then

wkhtmltopdf example-r-markdown.html example-r-markdown.pdf

The resulting file looked like this. It did not seem to handle the MathJax (this issue is discussed here), and the page breaks are ugly. However, in some cases, such a style might be preferred over a more LaTeX style presentation.