A.1 MS Windows

This guide assumes you have already installed R and the RStudio IDE. RStudio is not required but recommended, because it makes it easier to work with R Markdown. If you don’t have RStudio IDE installed, you will also have to install Pandoc. If you have RStudio installed there is no need to install Pandoc separately because it’s bundled with RStudio. Next you can install the rmarkdown package in RStudio using the following code:

# Install from CRAN
install.packages('rmarkdown', dep = TRUE)

The dep = TRUE argument will also install a bunch of additional R packages on which rmarkdown depends.

If you want to generate PDF output, you will need to install LaTeX. For R Markdown users who have not installed LaTeX before, we recommend that you install TinyTeX. You can install TinyTex from within RStudio using the following code:

install.packages('tinytex')
tinytex::install_tinytex()  # install TinyTeX

TinyTeX is a lightweight, portable, cross-platform, and easy-to-maintain LaTeX distribution. The R companion package tinytex can help you automatically install missing LaTeX packages when compiling LaTeX or R Markdown documents to PDF. An alternative option would be to install MiKTeX instead. You can download the latest distribution of MiKTeX. Installing MiKTeX is pretty straight forward, but it can sometimes be a pain to get it to play nicely with RStudio. If at all possible we recommend that you use TinyTex.

With the rmarkdown package, RStudio/Pandoc, and LaTeX, you should be able to compile most R Markdown documents.