Unable to change engine to xelatex with tufte-handout

[rstudio]

Unable to change engine to xelatex with tufte-handout

[zeigerpuppy]

As a note to anyone also having this problem,
I have temporarily worked around it by pulling in a preamble using the following in the YAML header.
It's still using pdflatex but at least the greek characters work...

header-includes:
    - \input{preamble.tex}

and preamble.tex

% set font encoding for PDFLaTeX or XeLaTeX
\usepackage{ifxetex}
\ifxetex
  \usepackage{fontspec}
\else
  \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
  \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
  \usepackage{lmodern}
  \usepackage[greek,english]{babel}
  \usepackage{textgreek}
\fi

[yihui]

Use

rmarkdown::render("Protocol.Rmd", "tufte::tufte_handout")

instead of

rmarkdown::render("Protocol.Rmd", tufte::tufte_handout(toc = TRUE))

And setting latex_engine is enough:

output:
  tufte::tufte_handout:
    latex_engine: xelatex

There is no need to use pandoc_args.

The reason that you got pdflatex all the time because you called the function tufte::tufte_handout() to return the output format (which overrides your YAML settings), and the default value for latex_engine is pdflatex in the function.

FWIW, I used xelatex in the default template in this package, so xelatex definitely should work:
https://github.com/rstudio/tufte/blame/master/inst/rmarkdown/templates/tufte_html/skeleton/skeleton.Rmd#L10

BTW, I can only handle Github issues for bug reports and feature requests, and usually I don't have time to answer general questions. Please ask future questions on StackOverflow instead, so you won't have to wait for me. Thanks!

[zeigerpuppy]

Thank you, that worked well. It makes sense now that I know the options get overridden!

[github-actions]

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