The behavior of the knitr button in RStudio when rendering an Rmd file sitting inside a blogdown static folder

I have an Rmd file that I want to convert to a pdf file. Currently it is located in a subfolder of the "static" folder that is a part of my blog site structure created by the blogdown package. The problem is, when I hit the "Knit" button in RStudio, it calls rmarkdown::render_site(...) while I was expecting rmarkdown::render(...). I do have a file R/build.R with a single line of a command blogdown::build_dir("static") so this is weird to me. When I tried to convert other Rmd files in a different folder (not associated with my blog folders/files) everything works perfectly fine as expected.

To get what I want, I am currently typing rmarkdown::render("myfile.Rmd") in the console, or I am using infinite moon reader, but neither is as convenient as the "Knit" button :(

The following is the output from xfun::session_info('blogdown') after updating the blogdown package to ver 1.1:

> xfun::session_info('blogdown')  R version 4.0.3 (2020-10-10)  Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)  Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 18363), RStudio 1.4.1103    Locale:    LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252    LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252    LC_NUMERIC=C                           LC_TIME=English_United States.1252        Package version:    base64enc_0.1.3 BH_1.75.0.0     blogdown_1.1    bookdown_0.21   digest_0.6.27   evaluate_0.14   glue_1.4.2         graphics_4.0.3  grDevices_4.0.3 highr_0.8       htmltools_0.5.0 httpuv_1.5.4    jsonlite_1.7.2  knitr_1.30         later_1.1.0.1   magrittr_2.0.1  markdown_1.1    methods_4.0.3   mime_0.9        promises_1.1.1  R6_2.5.0           Rcpp_1.0.5      rlang_0.4.9     rmarkdown_2.6   servr_0.21      stats_4.0.3     stringi_1.5.3   stringr_1.4.0      tinytex_0.29    tools_4.0.3     utils_4.0.3     xfun_0.20       yaml_2.2.1       

edited: I am not absolutely sure if this will help, but the Rmd file I want to convert to pdf goes like the following:

---  title: "Homework 3"  subtitle: "due Feb 2, 2021"  output:    pdf_document: default  ---  

knitr::opts_chunk$set(    echo = FALSE,    fig.align = "center")  library(tidyverse)  

\bigskip    **1.** Recall `iris` data set. Find the maximum value of the sum `Sepal.Length` $+$ `Sepal.Width`. To which species does the sample with the maximum value you found above belong? _Hint_: you might want to start with defining a new variable `Sepal.Sum` using `mutate()`, for example.   

iris %>%    mutate(Sepal.Sum = Sepal.Length + Sepal.Width) %>%    arrange(desc(Sepal.Sum)) %>%    slice(1) %>%    select(Sepal.Sum, Species)  

When I save this file in the folder ``

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65820777/the-behavior-of-the-knitr-button-in-rstudio-when-rendering-an-rmd-file-sitting-i January 21, 2021 at 11:31AM