From the course: Creating Reports and Presentations with R Markdown and RStudio

What are LaTeX and BibTeX? - RStudio Tutorial

From the course: Creating Reports and Presentations with R Markdown and RStudio

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What are LaTeX and BibTeX?

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- [Instructor] R Markdown is incredibly powerful and complex. Under the hood there are many different dependencies. We need to be very explicit about our dependence on LaTeX, if we want to create any type of PDF document with R Markdown. So what exactly is LaTeX? LaTeX is an extremely popular markup language in academia, though, primarily in the physical sciences. It has excellent support for document layouts, for instance, multiple columns of text with images that span multiple columns. Many folks choose to use LaTeX because they need to format mathematical formula and expressions for which there really isn't any competition. PDF is the de facto standard output of LaTeX. A lot of work has been put into the PDF generating facility of LaTeX, which is why it is used in R Markdown. BibTeX is the reference management tool for LaTeX documents. It dictates how references are formatted and how citations appear within text. It's extremely customizable and flexible. Popular reference management tools like Mendeley, EndNote and Zotero all fit neatly with a BibTeX and a LaTeX workflow. So why do we care about LaTeX when working in R Markdown? Well, LaTeX is required to customize the style and appearance of all PDF documents and their contents created with R Markdown. This is very different from HTML documents created with R Markdown, where we need to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to customize the output.

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