In my class I use a custom Rmarkdown template for students to compile their rmd files to pdf in order to submit them to our LMS for grading. In the past some students typed unicode characters in their files, which then mysteriously failed to compile with latex, so I changed the engine to xelatex and used a unicode aware font. This is the YAML header form the template.
---
title: ""
author: ""
output:
pdf_document:
df_print: tibble
latex_engine: xelatex
html_document:
toc: true
toc_depth: 2
toc_float: true
df_print: paged
code_folding: none
code_download: false
geometry: margin=1in
mainfont: FreeSerif
---
On Rstudio cloud, this will not compile because of missing unicode-math LaTeX package. I installed unicode-math in the base project following the instructions here, but when testing it, it seems that the local LaTeX environment does not get inherited from the base project to my students' projects.
Is there something I can do about that?