The template source is the markdown file response.md, which uses a minimal preamble provided in preamble.tex that makes quote blocks pop out, which is nice for the response.
To render the response into a PDF file, you can use this command:
Rscript -e "library(rmarkdown); library(utils); render('response.md')"See the provided response.pdf for the expected output.
There are many other ways to render markdown files that may work as well.
However, pandoc response.md -o response.pdf does not work, since it appears to ignore the preamble, therefore it does not highlight the quote blocks correctly (so don't use that).