rmarkdown: pandoc: pdflatex not found

Question

When I use the render{rmarkdown} to produce pdf file from .Rmd file on my Mac, an error message says

pandoc: pdflatex not found. pdflatex is needed for pdf output.

Answer 1

This might help a bit, in case you don't have any Latex stuff installed yet.

env: macOS Sierra

1. from https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/307483/setting-up-basictex-homebrew

brew cask install basictex

2. Now you need to figure out where pdflatex is hiding...

(env) jluc@texbin$ pwd /Library/TeX/texbin (env) jluc@texbin$ ls | grep pdfla lrwxr-xr-x 1 user wheel 6 13 Mar 10:36 pdflatex -> pdftex (env) jluc@texbin$ ls /Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex lrwxr-xr-x 1 user wheel 6 13 Mar 10:36 /Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex -> pdftex

/Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex is what we need, you can't refer to the pdftex symlink and/or use realpath because pandoc specifically wants to see pdflatex

3. update your command line to point to the appropriate file.

pandoc myfile.md --to=pdf -t latex -o myfile.pdf --latex-engine=/Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex