Is possible have running TeX remote and connect to RStudio IDE

[michalslovik]

I have theoretic question.

I know that on RStudio Server (which mostly running on unix machine, like ubuntu) is possible to generate rmarkdown document into PDF via TeX. RStudio Server use this unix distribution of TeX (like Texlive or MikteX).

**Is possible to use similar "server TeX" distribution for compiling and creating PDF from RStudio IDE (desktop) ? Like remote server ? **

Because in common way users needs to install TeX live on local machine, which take time, resources,... (many of them, do not have idea about TeX ), so i think is easier use one remote server for connect, deploy files, create pdf and receive that.

And another questions is about RStudio Connect which can create html, application, shiny,..... but can not PDF or can?

Last question is using existing solutions (like sharelatex.com or overleaf) ?

Thanks for any advice

[andrie]

You can certainly use LaTex on RStudio Connect. To do this, make sure you install the tex packages. This is described in the admin guide at https://docs.rstudio.com/connect/admin/getting-started.html#installation

Once you've installed the tex dependencies, you can specify pdf output in your R Markdown documents.

On RStudio Server you could investigate running the compilation step as a launcher job. This will put the process in the background so it doesn't tie up your R session.

[rstub]

In addition to @andrie's answer: On the desktop you could make use of the TinyTeX LaTeX distribution, see https://yihui.org/tinytex/. It is based on (current) TeXLive and is geared towards usage with R Markdown. From within R you can install it with

tinytex::install_tinytex()