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

[Alexander Shenkin]

This sounds neat, and I wish you the best of luck with it.  While I'm
sure it'll be great for folks who are already curious enough to dive
into Sweave or knitr, my guess is that coaxing collaborators into using
markdown with SVN or GIT instead of passing around a Word file with
Track Changes is going to be a tough sell, to put it lightly.

I'll keep my eyes out for emerging sweave/knitr <-> word solutions (note
the double arrow), but sounds like manual change-synchronization is the
only game in town right now, alas.

Thanks,
Allie

On 4/7/2012 4:29 PM, Yihui Xie wrote:
> 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
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org 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.