On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 6:43 AM, Yihui Xie <xie@yihui.name> wrote:

> Yes, I did not expect partial evaluation when I designed knitr, and
> this sounds like a good idea. Given the current design (parser +
> evaluator + renderer), I do not think it is hard to allow partial
> evaluation of a single chunk and return a character string for that
> chunk. My question is what you are going to do with this partial
> result; it is not a complete LaTeX document.
>
>
Maybe into some sort of preview buffer?


> That being said, I believe the cache feature might be an alternative
> solution. The main reason that you do not want to compile the whole
> document is probably about speed. If you enable cache in knitr, it
> will not take much time on R's side to knit the document. With a PDF
> viewer like Evince (but not Adobe Reader), you can keep the viewer
> open and stay at the page that you want to read; when you knit the
> file again, the page will be updated, so it feels like you are only
> knitting the current page.
>
>
Yea, caching could work for long computations with small results. My
problem is that the sizes of my objects are measured in gigabytes. Writing
and loading every intermediate result would be too much I/O, even if I had
the storage space. Thus, and for other reasons, I work interactively, not
in "batch mode".

My desire is in using the chunk meta language to separate the accidental
details of saving results (like plots and caching) from the intrinsic
details of the analysis. That is more general than generating a "report
document". I don't want to look at the report; I'm only interested in the
side effects.

I realize that this is probably on the edge of knitr's scope, so thanks for
humoring my suggestions.

Michael

Regards,
> Yihui
> --
> Yihui Xie <xieyihui@gmail.com>
> Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
> Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
> 2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 7:58 AM, Michael Lawrence
> <lawrence.michael@gene.com> wrote:
> >
> > It's probably both. It would be nice to have these types of features just
> > when using knitr directly, and then ESS would provide an interface. For
> > example, knitr could accept a character vector of chunk names to
> process. It
> > would be nice to have a renderer that would not write to a file but
> rather
> > return as a character vector what it would have written.
> >
>

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