[Rd] Sweave/ESS-like tools for HTML

[Douglas Bates]

My university provides me with a powerful course management system for
the courses that I teach.  Among other things I can create a wiki for
the course, which is very convenient for cross-linking different bits
of the course.

Naturally I use R extensively in my teaching and I want to incorporate
R code, output and graphics in such a wiki.  If I were producing LaTeX
sources instead of HTML sources I create .Rnw files for Sweave and I
would edit them using ESS in emacs.

What options do I have for producing HTML with embedded R content and
what is a good, preferably emacs-based, way of editing the source
code?

One basic problem is trying to present mathematical expressions in HTML (see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/math/) but, aside from that, there are
questions of presenting input R expressions and the corresponding
output and of incorporating graphics files produced by R.  I could try
to use latex2html or texi2html but the output from latex2html at least
would be quite inconvenient to use because it generates so many linked
files.  Once they are uploaded it would be horrible trying to get all
the links straightened out.

In a sense there are already tools for this type of output from .Rd
files.  Would it be best to use those tools or to use texinfo tools or
...?