PDF Docs from RMarkdown

Question

I have been having a ton of trouble for awhile now attempting to make PDF docs from Rmarkdown in Rstudio. My goal is to create the "Journal of Statistical Software" format and when I run the example script provided, I get an error.

Script:

---
author:
  - name: FirstName LastName
    affiliation: University/Company
    address: >
      First line
      Second line
    email: name@company.com
    url: http://rstudio.com
  - name: Second Author
    affiliation: Affiliation
title:
  formatted: "A Capitalized Title: Something about a Package \\pkg{foo}"
  # If you use tex in the formatted title, also supply version without
  plain:     "A Capitalized Title: Something about a Package foo"
  # For running headers, if needed
  short:     "\\pkg{foo}: A Capitalized Title"
abstract: >
  The abstract of the article.
keywords:
  # at least one keyword must be supplied
  formatted: [keywords, not capitalized, "\\proglang{Java}"]
  plain:     [keywords, not capitalized, Java]
preamble: >
  \usepackage{amsmath}
output: rticles::jss_article
---

# Introduction

This template demonstrates some of the basic latex you'll need to know to create a JSS article.

## Code formatting

Don't use markdown, instead use the more precise latex commands:

* \proglang{Java}
* \pkg{plyr}
* \code{print("abc")}

# R code

Can be inserted in regular R markdown blocks.

```{r}
x <- 1:10
x
```

When doing this my error is:

pandoc.exe: pdflatex not found. pdflatex is needed for pdf output.
Error: pandoc document conversion failed with error 41
In addition: Warning message:
running command '"C:/Program Files/RStudio/bin/pandoc/pandoc" +RTS -K512m -RTS Untitled.utf8.md --to latex --from markdown+autolink_bare_uris+ascii_identifiers+tex_math_single_backslash --output Untitled.pdf --template "C:\Users\OPTIMA~1\DOCUME~1\R\WIN-LI~1\3.3\rticles\RMARKD~1\TEMPLA~1\JSS_AR~1\RESOUR~1\template.tex" --highlight-style tango --latex-engine pdflatex' had status 41 
Execution halted

I know it has to do with download MikTex but I haven't been able to find an easy step-by-step way of downloading this in order to run PDF docs in RMarkdown from RStudio.

Any help would be great and if you know any ways of doing this directly from R instead of downloading something from the web then that would be the easiest solution I would think.

Thanks!

Answer 1

pandoc uses pdflatex to create pdf output, it is therefore mandatory to be installed.

Under Windows you could use miktex which you can find under https://miktex.org/download