Appendix B — Installing Quarto and LateX

Installing Quarto on your computer is pretty straight forward and should be painless. If you’re getting started with Quarto we suggest that you use RStudio but of course RStudio is not required and there are other options available. You will also need to install some additional software if you want to render your Quarto documents to PDF format.

This guide assumes you have already installed R and an IDE (RStudio IDE or VSCode). An IDE is not required but recommended, because it makes it easier to work with Quarto. If you don’t have RStudio IDE installed, you will also have to install Pandoc. If you have RStudio installed there is no need to install Pandoc separately because it’s bundled with RStudio.

Next you need to install Quarto. It is really straightforward, just download and install from the files specific to your OS (Windows, Mac or linux).

You should also install the quarto 📦 package using:

install.packages("quarto", dep = TRUE)

The dep = TRUE argument will also install a bunch of additional R packages on which the quarto 📦 depends.

Finally you can install the rmarkdown 📦 package but it is not strictly required if using Quarto.

install.packages("rmarkdown", dep = TRUE)

If you want to generate PDF output, you will need to install \(\LaTeX\). For R Markdown users who have not installed \(\LaTeX\) before, we recommend that you install TinyTeX. You can install TinyTex from within R using the tinytex 📦 package with the following code:

install.packages("tinytex")
tinytex::install_tinytex() # install TinyTeX

TinyTeX is a lightweight, portable, cross-platform, and easy-to-maintain \(\LaTeX\) distribution. The R companion package tinytex 📦 can help you automatically install missing \(\LaTeX\) packages when compiling \(\LaTeX\) or R Markdown documents to PDF.

B.1 MS Windows

An alternative option would be to install MiKTeX instead. You can download the latest distribution of MiKTeX. Installing MiKTeX is pretty straight forward, but it can sometimes be a pain to get it to play nicely with RStudio. If at all possible we recommend that you use TinyTex.

B.2 Mac OSX

If for some reason TinyTeX does not work on your Mac computer then you can try to install MacTeX instead. You can download the latest version of MacTeX here.

B.3 Linux

An alternative to TinyTex on linux would be to use a full fledge distribution of \(\LaTeX\) such as TexLive