Creating PDF reports with R on Ubuntu

Texi2pdf

Texi2pdf is a function from the tools package that Compiles LaTeX Files into PDFs.

Using the R command:

> texi2pdf("docs/rapports/draft/template2.tex")

Prompted the error:

Error in texi2dvi(file = file, pdf = TRUE, clean = clean, quiet = quiet,  :
  Running 'texi2dvi' on 'docs/rapports/draft/template2.tex' failed.
Messages:
sh: 1: /usr/bin/texi2dvi: not found

Installing texlive and texinfo fixed this error.

sudo apt-get install texinfo

sudo apt-get install texlive

For info the source of the texi2dvi bash script was mentioned by this blogger.

Accents

There was an issue with accents not rendered.
Loading this package fixes it:

 \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

devtools

 opts_knit$get() showed me options that don't exist any-more in the current version of the knitr package. I wanted to install the latest version of knitr.
I needed the package devtools.
But I couldn't install devtools because of this message

Cannot find curl-config

As explained in this mail, installing the package  "libcurl4-gnutls-dev" fixes this. I could then install the package devtools and load it.

To install the latest version of knitr:

library(devtools)
install_github(repo = "knitr", username = "yihui")

xtable

The xtable galery explains how to do longtable and tables in landscape format.It also demonstrates how to rotate column names and how to print a table of linear model coefficients.