How to convert R Markdown to HTML? I.e., What does "Knit HTML" do in Rstudio 0.96?
knitr, r, r-markdown, rstudio
Solution
Put `Sys.sleep(30)` in a chunk and you will see clearly what commands are called by RStudio. Basically they are
- `library(knitr); knit()` to get the markdown file;
- RStudio has internal functions to convert markdown to HTML;
The second step will be more transparent in the next version of the markdown package. Currently you can use `knitr::knit2html('your_file.Rmd')` to get a similar HTML file as RStudio gives you.
Update on 2019/09/17: The above answer applies to RStudio v0.96 (in the year 2012). Now R Markdown is compiled through `rmarkdown::render()`, which uses Pandoc instead of the retired R package markdown. See the post Relationship between R Markdown, Knitr, Pandoc, and Bookdown for more details.
Problem
What commands are run when pressing "Knit HTML" on an R Markdown file in Rstudio 0.96? My motivation is that I might want to run the same command when I'm in another text editing environment or I might want to combine the command in a larger `makefile`.