About LaTeX

Pronunciation: lay-tech

LaTeX is an open source markup language with a typesetting engine. It's been around since the 70s and generally makes awesome documents.

LaTeX is designed to work stand-alone, or integrate with other languages. It's particularly good with R.

It works in the way rmarkdown does with knitr, but allows for more sophisticated document styling.

Why LaTeX?

Get LaTeX

Once you have a LaTeX installation, you can write LaTeX in Rstudio.

In Rstudio, select the File type “R Sweave” which saves as a .Rnw file.

Learn LaTeX

LaTeX is a very deep language, so no attempt is made to teach you here.

One of the easiest ways of getting started with LaTeX (generally) is to pick one of the examples / templates on overleaf.com and play with it.

For using R and LaTeX, you can use the minimal examples on yihui.name/knitr to get started.

See the LaTeX wikibook for lots of info about LaTeX.