1 Installation

In this section, the aim is to have everyone setup with R, RStudio, and Quarto

1.1 Overview

Duration 15 minutes

1.2 Questions

How do I install R?
How do I install Quarto?
How do I install LaTeX in a sane way?

1.3 Software Setup

1.4 Checking you are up to date

To ensure you are up to date, run the following script to install the packages.

install.packages("quarto")
install.packages("knitr")
install.packages("here")
install.packages("tidyverse")
install.packages("broom")
install.packages("fs")
install.packages("usethis")

1.5 A note on PDF

Quarto documents can be compiled to PDF, which is a great feature. In order to convert the documents to PDF, they use a software called LaTeX (pronounced la-tek or lay-tek).

Installing LaTeX is thankfully handled when you install Quarto, as Quarto includes a built-in Latexmk engine.

1.5.1 PDF / LaTeX Pain

Installing LaTeX can be a pain, but thankfully Yihui Xie has put a lot of time and energy into making an easier way to install it - tinytex. tinytex is an R package that installs a sane, lightweight (<200Mb) version of LaTeX.

If you are running into issues rendering a PDF, you can try the following:

tinytex::install_tinytex()

If you get the following error, this is good! As it means that TeX has already been installed:

Error: Detected an existing tlmgr at /usr/local/bin/tlmgr. It seems TeX Live has been installed (check tinytex::tinytex_root()). You have to uninstall it, or use install_tinytex(force = TRUE) if you are sure TinyTeX can override it (e.g., you are a PATH expert or installed TinyTeX previously).

Alternatively, you can run the following from the terminal

quarto install tinytex
# follow the prompts from here

1.5.2 Problem solving with LaTeX

If you have any problems with installing tinytex, I recommend you check out the tinytex FAQ page.

1.6 Test Script

You should be able to run the following code on your machine

library(quarto)
library(knitr)
library(here)
library(tidyverse)
library(broom)
library(fs)
library(usethis)