[Rd] Sweave Feature Requests and Questions

[Charlotte Maia]

Hi Duncan, thank you for the comprehensive reply.

Firstly, though, I'm using Fedora 10.
Running Latex through Make is really fast, Sweave isn't.

I'll try [nogin] later, assuming it works, it will make my life a lot
easier, so a big thank you on that one.

On the Rplots issue, I don't want them, however Sweave produces them.
I find the task of deleting intermediate files (say for R package
vignettes) more difficult than it needs to be.


kind regards
Charlotte

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 12:40 PM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Charlotte Maia wrote:
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I would like to request the following features for Sweave:
>> 1. The keep.source option, to respect empty lines in input.
>>
>
> I think it's too late for that one.  keep.source was introduced in 2006, and
> there were a large number of unreasonable complaints about it -- so many
> that I'm not going near that again.
>
>> 2. The prefix.string option, to apply to all generated files, e.g. no
>> Rplots.pdf.
>>
>
> Why do you want to keep Rplots.pdf?  I think a more reasonable request is
> not to produce it at all.
>
>> 3. That Sweave, doesn't change the graphics settings for the entire
>> Latex Document. By default including a pdf image, should use it's
>> actual size, rather than making it a fixed proportion of the text
>> width.
>>
>
> I think this is an option.  Use something like
>
> \usepackage[nogin]{Sweave}
>
> to turn it off.
>
>> 4. A new option to allow generation of Serror chunks, where the R code
>> generates an error or a warning.
>>
>
> That's a good idea that has been suggested before.  I think it's just a
> matter of someone doing it (or it may have been done in one of the Sweave
> add-on packages).
>>
>> Furthermore, any help appreciated here:
>> 1. Does anyone know how to build Sweave documents, using Make, without
>> starting a new instance (or multiple instances) of R, every time Make
>> is called?
>>
>
> I think the generic answer here is that you shouldn't be using an OS where
> starting new instances is so time consuming.  Make is designed for OS's
> where it's rather cheap to start the same program many times.   So maybe you
> should suggest to Microsoft (I'm assuming you're on Windows) about that fact
> that it is so slow at this common task?
>
>> 2. Does anyone know a simple workaround to problem 3, without killing
>> the entire Sweave.sty file?
>>
>
> Besides the one above, you can use \setkeys{Gin}  to change the default size
> of graphics.
>>
>> Furthermore, I'm temped to stop Sweave from generating all the eps
>> files (I saw an option for this in the Sweave documentation), however
>> I'm concerned it may stop others from building the document, if they
>> use postscript.
>>
>> Then again, do enough people use postscript, to warrant such
>> consideration?
>>
>
> I think this depends on your audience, but probably most users of a document
> written using Sweave are just going to read the PDF that you produced, they
> aren't going to process it themselves.  On the other hand, those eps files
> are handy because they allow you to work with .dvi files, and .dvi
> previewers are still smarter than .pdf previewers, for things like reverse
> search.  (Use patchDVI so reverse searches go to the .Rnw file, not the
> intermediate .tex file.)  So I leave Sweave producing both pdf and eps.
>  Disk space is cheap.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>


-- 
Charlotte Maia
http://sites.google.com/site/maiagx