Thanks Christophe for introducing weasydoc!
Jason, the facts you described were exactly the starting point for reengineering my PDF toolchain without LaTeX. I confirm that it is feasible to forget LaTeX and produce high quality PDF with HTML+CSS.
The process behind weasydoc is the following:
- Rmd to md with knitr
- md to html with pandoc
- html+CSS Paged Media to pdf with dedicated tools (browsers do not support CSS Paged Media): PDF styling is done only with CSS rules.
Note: If you are looking for the 3rd step only, you can use weasydoc::make_pdf(), it takes an html file in entry.
I gathered some references about CSS Paged Media in the weasydoc README. I hope it can be helpful!
I'm polishing my slides for the uRos2018 conference next week. I'll post a link to the slideshow here.