[R] SWEAVE - a gentle introduction

[Henrik Bengtsson]

When choosing source format, it's probably helpful to know that if you
work with a Markdown-based format (e.g. Rmarkdown) you'll be able to
generate either/both HTML or/and PDF documents, whereas if you work
with LaTeX-based formats (e.g. Sweave/knitr) you will only be able
output PDF documents (at least without great efforts).

One major advantage with HTML documents/reports is that they aren't
constrained by page breaks, e.g. you don't have to worry about
generating long tables that run across two or more pages. With LaTeX
that is often a great pain.  These days even mathematical equations
renders quite well in HTML.  I tend to use HTML output for everyday
analysis reports and PDF occasionally for more final artifacts such as
supplementary notes where I want to have full control of layout,
equations, figure sizes and bibliographies.

If you plan to write package vignettes using one of the above formats,
choice of vignette format does not matter these days.  They're all
equally easy to use and incorporate in packages.

Cheers,

Henrik

On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 11:09 AM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17/11/2015 10:42 AM, Marc Schwartz wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Nov 17, 2015, at 9:21 AM, John Sorkin <jsorkin at grecc.umaryland.edu>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I am looking for a gentle introduction to SWEAVE, and would appreciate
>>> recommendations.
>>> I have an R program that I want to run and have the output and plots in
>>> one document. I believe this can be accomplished with SWEAVE. Unfortunately
>>> I don't know HTML, but am willing to learn. . . as I said I need a gentle
>>> introduction to SWEAVE.
>>> Thank you,
>>> John
>>>
>>
>>
>> John,
>>
>> A couple of initial comments.
>>
>> First, you will likely get some recommendations to also consider using
>> Knitr:
>>
>>    http://yihui.name/knitr/
>>
>> which I do not use myself (I use Sweave), but to be fair, is worth
>> considering as an alternative.
>
>
> He did, and I'd agree with them.  I've switched to knitr for all new
> projects and some old ones.  knitr should be thought of as Sweave version 2.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
>
>>
>> Second, to create stand alone documents, as opposed to web based content,
>> you will likely want the output to be in TeX/LaTeX via Sweave, which can
>> then become PDF based documents via the post processing of the TeX/LaTeX
>> source. That is what I do for all of my analytic deliverables. You can also
>> use LaTeX classes like 'Beamer' to create Powerpoint-like slides for
>> presentation.
>>
>> Fritz' web site for Sweave is here:
>>
>>    http://www.statistik.lmu.de/~leisch/Sweave/
>>
>> and there are some links to supporting materials there with very basic
>> examples.
>>
>> Another resource is:
>>
>>    https://beckmw.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/sweave_intro1.pdf
>>
>> and if you Google for Sweave Introductions and Tutorials, there are a
>> myriad of others.
>>
>> In conjunction with Sweave itself, there are a variety of supporting
>> packages on CRAN that have related functionality (e.g. formatted LaTeX
>> output) that are worth knowing about and are included in the Reproducible
>> Research task view:
>>
>>    https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/ReproducibleResearch.html
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Marc Schwartz
>>
>> ______________________________________________
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>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.