It's pretty easy to compile the documents; it's all just R functions (rmarkdown is a wrapper around knitr and pandoc). I've been writing Rmarkdown docs for many

It's pretty easy to compile the documents; it's all just R functions (rmarkdown is a wrapper around knitr and pandoc). I've been writing Rmarkdown docs for many years in Emacs without hiccups (or without hiccups from rmarkdown::render, anyway).