Pandoc's environment cslreferences undefined when knitting RMarkdown to PDF in RStudio

Question

Knitting (in RStudio version 1.2.1335) an RMarkdown file to PDF fails when trying to create citations (for pandoc version 2.8.0.1, and R version 3.6.1). (This does not happe

Answer 1

According to the release notes you linked, cslreferences was introduced in version 2.8, including a suitable definition of this environment in the pandoc template. However, Rmarkdown is using its own template (C:\Users\gcb7\Documents\R\win-library\3.6\rmarkdown\rmd\latex\default-1.17.0.2.tex in your case), which does not have this definition. This has been fixed on GitHub, c.f. https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown/issues/1649.

One workaround would be to copy the relevant lines to a local copy of Rmarkdown's template and specify that via the template field. Alternatively you could add

\newlength{\cslhangindent}
\setlength{\cslhangindent}{1.5em}
\newenvironment{cslreferences}%
  {\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}%
  \everypar{\setlength{\hangindent}{\cslhangindent}}\ignorespaces}%
  {\par}

or

\newenvironment{cslreferences}%
  {}%
  {\par}

to the resulting tex file via header-includes or similar. Or you could use the pandoc that comes with RStudio, if you have that installed. This can be accomplished by prepending <rstudio-dir>/bin/pandoc/ to the PATH, possibly within .Renviron to make it R specific.

Everything untested, since I do not have pandoc 2.8 ...