[R] How do Sweave users collaborate with Word users?

[Yihui Xie]

I cannot reply in detail at the moment, but we have a proposal to the
Google Summer of Code this year which will address the collaboration
issue. The basic idea is to write everything in plain text with
markdown (including R code), and compile the file with the knitr
package, then convert it to Word or whatever other formats with
pandoc, which is an extremely powerful document converter. You can see
a simple example here for how knitr works with markdown:
http://yihui.name/knitr/demo/upload/ Since everything is in plain
text, it is easy to collaborate through a version control system like
SVN or GIT. Markdown is easy to write and cleaner compared to Word.

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA



On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 3:54 PM, Alexander Shenkin <ashenkin at ufl.edu> wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I'm getting my workflow switched over to Sweave, which is very cool.
> However, I collaborate with folks (as many of you must as well) who use
> Word to Track Changes amongst a group while crafting a paper.  In the
> simplest case, there will just be two people (one Sweave user and one
> Word user) editing a paper.
>
> I'm wondering, how do Sweave users go about this?  I could convert a
> sweave file to a .docx easily enough via an intermediary pdf, rtf, html
> or otherwise.  However, once the file has been marked up with changes,
> the challenge is to migrate those (accepted) changes back to the sweave
> document.  Perhaps the most straightforward way is to manually
> back-propagate changes, but I imagine that could be a painstaking process.
>
> Ideally, I imagine a tool that puts invisible tags in the word document
> when it is originally produced from Sweave, and is then able to
> propagate changes back to that sweave file after markup.  I'd be
> pleasantly surprised if such a tool existed.
>
> Perhaps there are other ways of making this work.  Any thoughts are
> kindly appreciated!
>
> Thanks,
> Allie
>
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