Motivation

I should take action on developing my route 2 training package. I want to use R bookdown to build the pdf for my portfolio.

Setting up LaTex on MacOS

To get the demo pdf in the get-started tutorial, I need to set up LaTex on my Macbook.

I followed the instruction here.

At Step 1, I found that mactex-basic.pkg is too old. I followed instruction here to install BasicTex.pkg, a lightweight distribution of MacTex.pkg which is a very large package.

After installing BasicTex, I can run tex and tlmgr in Terminal.

Note: For Windows, Tex Live can be downloaded and installed here.

Now I go back to RStudio and test if can build the book now.

! LaTeX Error: File `framed.sty' not found.

! Emergency stop.
<read *> 

Error: LaTeX failed to compile bookdown-demo.tex. See https://yihui.org/tinytex/r/#debugging for debugging tips. See bookdown-demo.log for more info.
Execution halted
Error: bookdown::render_book() failed to render the output format 'bookdown::pdf_book'.
Execution halted

I now run tinytex::tlmgr_update() but it needs to be run as sudo. In terminal I ran:

sudo tlmgr update --all --self

And all done. Try build the book again led to failure. I looked back at https://yihui.org/tinytex/r/#debugging, where it suggested turning on options(tinytex.verbose = TRUE) in R Markdown file.

There was a new file bookdown-demo.log generated. Reading the file pointing me to this error message:

! LaTeX Error: File 'framed.sty' not found.

So, I looked up and found an answer on Github here, where it suggested that I need to install the framed package by running:

sudo tlmgr install framed

Rebuilding the book, and this time I got this error:

Error: Must install the following packages to use bs4_book():
* downlit

After running install.packages("downlit"), I rebuild the book and it was successful!! By the end of today (2 Apr), I had a working draft and inserted all the competencies as tables. This allows me to prepare for the probation meeting on Monday with Angela, before the meeting I will go as Mobeen suggested, to think how to relate activities and identify gaps.

Ignoring space in variable names in {bookdown}

In read.csv(), set check.names = FALSE allows keeping the variable names, which is helpful in {bookdown} to generate PDF tables with column names containing spaces as expected.

Avoid rendering comma into separate columns

In csv files, wrapping comma with double quotes avoid rendering into separate columns. Then I can focus on generating csv of competencies.

See also: post on Stack Overflow

Column spec in knitr::kable()

kable_styling(full_width = F) %>% column_spec(2, width = “30em”)

But I cannot use this functions because my Latex lacks file multirow.sty. I found a Stack Overflow page here which suggested that I need to install texlive-latex-extra.

So, I need to install MacPort to run port command, and then to run this command:

sudo port install texlive-latex-extra

I gave up this route as it gave me more lower-level errors. Instead, I tried another answer from the same StackOverflow post:

tlmgr install collection-latexextra

And problem solved! multirow.sty is added. Now I can fine-tune the second and third columns.

See also: Create Awesome LaTeX Table with knitr::kable and kableExtra