rmarkdown: render to .pdf using existing .md files created for .html

Question

Is that possible at all? At the moment I have to render my .Rmd files twice, once for an html and once for a pdf report. Each of them take about 50 mins. So if I can use the html .md files created after rendering, that would save me 50 mins.

Answer 1

If your .md document is already created, you can simply use:

library("rmarkdown")
render("mydoc.md", output_format = "pdf_document")

If you always need to generate both html and pdf, then render both at the same time using J_F's solution.