[R] opinions please: text editors and reporting/Sweave?

[Mike Lawrence]

One minor warning regarding LaTeX: I have encountered journals in the  
psychological field (specifically, journals of the psychonomic  
society) that refuse to accept articles prepared in LaTeX, even if  
they are submitted as PDF. I'm a big LaTeX fan myself, so I really  
can't comprehend this.

On 30-May-07, at 6:07 PM, Greg Snow wrote:

> Tim,
>
> First, I personnally am a big fan of LaTeX, Emacs, and ESS and I think
> that in the long run you would benefit from learning all of them
> (probably start with Emacs, then ESS, then LaTeX once you already  
> have a
> knowledge of Emacs and how it can help).
>
> Since you asked about the simplest way to go, you may want to look at
> the odfWeave package.  This gives you the power of Sweave, but without
> having to learn LaTeX.  It works with documents in openoffice (a free
> office suite similar to and mostly compatible with microsoft office
> (word)).  Using this you can create your template using openoffice
> writer (or MS word, then convert using openoffice), run it through
> R/odfWeave, and have the result as another openoffice document that  
> can
> then be converted to MS word or pdf.
>
> Personally, if I am doing something for myself, or in which the output
> format does not matter, then I use Sweave with LaTeX (using Emacs and
> ESS).  But, often my results need to be sent to a client that will cut
> and past my results into an MS word document or power point
> presentation.  Then I find it easier to use openoffice and odfWeave  
> and
> have the end result be an MS word document that can be e-mailed to the
> client for them to mangle in ways they feel the need to.
>
> (there is also an HTML driver for Sweave I nthe the R2HTML package  
> where
> you can have the template file resemble html and the final output  
> is in
> html)
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> -- 
> Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
> Statistical Data Center
> Intermountain Healthcare
> greg.snow at intermountainmail.org
> (801) 408-8111
>
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
>> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Tim Howard
>> Sent: Wednesday, May 30, 2007 2:43 PM
>> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
>> Subject: [R] opinions please: text editors and reporting/Sweave?
>>
>> dear all -
>>
>> I currently use Tinn-R as my text editor to work with code
>> that I submit to R, with some output dumped to text files,
>> some images dumped to pdf. (system: Windows 2K and XP, R
>> 2.4.1 and R 2.5). We are using R for overnight runs to create
>> large output data files for GIS, but then I need simple
>> output reports for analysis results for each separate data
>> set. Thus, I create many reports of the same style, but just
>> based on different input data.
>>
>> I am recognizing that I need a better reporting system, so
>> that I can create clean reports for each separate R run. This
>> obviously means using Sweave and some implementation of
>> LaTex, both of which are new to me. I've installed MikTex and
>> successfully completed a demo or two for creating pdfs from raw  
>> LaTeX.
>>
>> It appears that if I want to ease my entry into the world of
>> LaTeX, I might need to switch editors to something like Emacs
>> (I read somewhere that Emacs helps with the TeX markup?).
>> After quite a while wallowing at the Emacs site, I am finding
>> that ESS is well integrated with R and might be the way to
>> go. Aaaagh... I'm in way over my head!
>>
>> My questions:
>>
>> What, in your opinion, is the simplest way to integrate text
>> and graphics reports into a single report such as a pdf file.
>>
>> If the answer to this is LaTeX and Sweave, is it difficult to
>> use a text editor such as Tinn-R or would you strongly
>> recommend I leave behind Tinn and move over to an editor that
>> has more LaTeX help?
>>
>> In reading over Friedrich Leisch's "Sweave User Manual" (v
>> 1.6.0) I am beginning to think I can do everything I need
>> with my simple editor. Before spending many hours going down
>> that path, I thought it prudent to ask the R community.
>>
>> It is likely I am misunderstanding some of the process here
>> and any clarifications are welcome.
>>
>> Thank you in advance for any thoughts.
>> Tim Howard
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>> 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.
>>
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> 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.

--
Mike Lawrence
Graduate Student, Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University

Website: http://myweb.dal.ca/mc973993
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"The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express:
Err and err and err again, but less and less and less."
	- Piet Hein