Using pdflatex or something similar in R 3.0.1

Question

I would like to compile a pdf document using Sweave() and pdflatex using R 3.0.1

The sweave() command works, however, pdflatex from the package 'utils' or 'tools' cannot be installed because it is not available for R version 3.0.1).

Is there any other way to compile a pdf from R?

Answer 1

Try texi2pdf from the tools package

require(tools)
tex_code <-
"\\documentclass{article}
\\begin{document}
Hello \\LaTeX
\\end{document}"

cat(tex_code, file = "/tmp/code.tex")

texi2pdf("/tmp/code.tex", clean = TRUE)

Just in case you have trouble, there's a texi2dvi argument inside this function to choose your backend in my machine the default is /usr/bin/texi2dvi but we can change it like this

texi2pdf("/tmp/code.tex", texi2dvi = "/usr/bin/texi2pdf", clean  = TRUE)

Change it accoring to your settings. I don't have Mac OS but I'm sure that you'll find something similar in /usr/texbin

Answer 2

Just use system:

system(paste("pdflatex",filetopdf))

where filetopdf is the name of your .tex file.

You can also look at knit2pdf from the knitr package.