latexpdf helps you create pdf documents in R using LaTeX techniques; this is especially useful for making stand-alone PDF images of data.frames. For report-length PDF, some flavor of markup or markdown (e.g. Sweave, Rmarkdown) is probably a more attractive mechanism for the main document; in this context, latexpdf can be used to embed tables with the same aesthetics as stand-alone versions.
Tim Bergsma, bergsmat@gmail.com
"Anything in LaTeX can be expressed in terms of commands and environments", (<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Absolute_Beginners>). Accordingly, latexpdf provides R functions to generate LaTeX commands (command()) and environments (wrap()). For commands, care is taken to support options and arguments. These can be used to create character vectors containing arbitrary LaTeX code.
In fact, the package itself uses these functions to convert data frames to LaTeX code, providing reasonable defaults and supporting many aesthetic interventions. See '?as.tabular' and '?as.ltable' (tabular and table environments, respectively). See also 'vignette('tabular') for a demonstration of options.
While latexpdf can be useful for low-level operations, creating PDF documents directly is more powerful. Pre-generated LaTeX code can be inserted into literate programming documents (Sweave, Rmarkdown) or can be auto-converted to stand-alone PDF documents (see especially '?as.pdf.data.frame'). Functions tex2pdf() and viewtex() create and visualize arbitrary tex code by converting to PDF documents. They rely on as.pdf.document(), which places a system call to 'pdflatex'.
Some file formats, such as MS Word and Powerpoint, cannot embed PDF images. Experimental support is available for converting PDF to PNG. For example, if you switch from Rmarkdown's pdf_document() to word_document(), you may want to switch from as.pdf() to as.png() for your images. PNG functionality relies requires the local Ghostscript installation (see '?ghostconvert') which is almost certainly present if 'pdflatex' is. Ghostscript may be hard to find. See '?tools::find_gs_cmd'; for Miktex installations, consider 'find_gs_cmd(gs_cmd = 'mgs')'.