[R] Latex no where to be seen

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 5:18 AM, Donald Paul Winston
<satchwinston at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I'm experimenting using R as a report writer. I'm told LaTex is the
> destination for my quest. But ?latex() gives me an error. The package
> manager does not have it. The package installer can't find it. Where is it?

 Have you tried RSiteSearch("latex")? LaTeX is not an R package, but a
separate system for beautiful typesetting. It is slightly unfortunate
that searching on google for LaTeX ignores the capitalisation and can
return results for rubber products, but RSiteSearch is your friend
here.

> It amazes me that there's not a built in "report" function that can produce
> the same kinds of reports that every report writer and data analysis
> software in the whole word can do. (see SAS, Crystal Reports, SPSS, Oracle
> Reports, Actuate, Hyperion, Cognos, ..etc)

 It amazes me even more that each of these report writers either a)
uses MS Word output which is ugly typesetting (especially equations)
or b) has to implement its own self-developed typesetting system. No
wonder Windows software seems bloated and expensive. In the Open
Source and Unix world (which is where LaTeX originated, although it is
cross-platform) the idea is that you have one thing that does one
thing well, and then everyone can leverage that.

 So, what you probably want is MikTeX on your Windows box, or check
for latex in your Linux package management system (apt, yum, whatever,
you didn't tell us your system), or do whatever hipster MacOS fanbois
do.

Barry