What does “Knit HTML” do in Rstudio 0.98?

Question

I am trying to figure out what command and default options RStudio uses when pressing the \"knit HTML\" button in RStudio version 0.98.1091 because I get a slightly differen

Answer 1

As @rawr pointed out in the comments:

rmarkdown::render('your_document.Rmd', 'html_document', 'new_titel.html')

works and creates the same document as the Knit HTML button.

Answer 2

I believe it currently uses the html_document function in the RMarkdown package

Answer 3

When I look at the RMarkdown tab (right of Console tab) it looks like they run knitr::knit and then a fairly involved pandoc shell line

/usr/local/lib/rstudio/bin/pandoc/pandoc filename.utf8.md --to html --from markdown+autolink_bare_uris+ascii_identifiers+tex_math_single_backslash-implicit_figures --output filename.html --smart --email-obfuscation none --self-contained --standalone --section-divs --table-of-contents --toc-depth 3 --template /home/me/R/i686-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.1/rmarkdown/rmd/h/default.html --variable 'theme:flatly' --include-in-header /tmp/user/1001/RtmpKz5GnI/rmarkdown-str3bba3848bd7b.html --mathjax --variable 'mathjax-url:https://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML' --no-highlight --variable highlightjs=/home/cd/R/i686-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.1/rmarkdown/rmd/h/highlight

From the very first /usr/local/lib/rstudio/bin/pandoc/pandoc I infer that they bring their own pandoc, probably figuring duplication is better than debugging to play nice with everyone's idiosyncratic pandoc versions.

---

So to me it looks like RStudio is doing the following:

1. knit
2. pandoc with their special pandoc version and a lot of flags

and step #2 is where the interpretation of your header

---
title: "Report Title"
author: Daddy the Runner
date:  "`r format(Sys.time(), '%A, %B %d, %Y')`"
output: 
  html_document:
    keep_md: true
---

happens.

HTH.