Sweave

Introduction

Sweave is a system for mixing LaTeX and R (S) code to generate e.g., reports package documentation (vignettes). It is now part of the standard R distribution (Package tools) and maintained by Friedrich Leisch who also hosts its home page, where the latest version of documentation and FAQ are available.

For Emacs users there is also an extension sweave-site.el.

Overview

An extended example consists of the following files:

ASCII data file bike2004.csv
Template file bike.Rnw
R code files

bike.R
Simple.R (modified from Package Simple)

LaTeX style file smallcap.sty
The resulting PDF file bike.pdf

Directions

The template file is a standard LaTeX File with two special constructs

Code blocks enclosed in <<[label|options] >>= and @
S expressions \Sexpr{}

This file is processed with the Sweave("bike.Rnw") from the R prompt (assuming that the working directory is set to the directory containing the named file). This will created a file bike.tex, that contains the LaTeX blocks as written in the Rnw file interspersed with the processed output from the R commands

This file is then run through the regular LaTeX process to created either a (DVI,) PS, or PDF file.

Figures are created as EPS and PDF files, so both major output formats, PS and PDF, are supported.

Some details may be found by studying the example files ...