Recommendations for developing Sweave documents

Question

I'm looking to streamline my Sweave document creation, and I'd like to hear about people's current setups. I feel like the holy grail goes something like this:

• Editing Rnw code on one half of the screen
• Single keybinding compiles Sweave document and runs pdflatex
• View PDF on the other half of the screen; once compiled, PDF is refreshed and centered around the portion of the document you're editing
• If compilation has errors, replace the PDF with the results of the compilation (e.g. latex errors or Sweave errors)

I am guessing/hoping that the solution is part Emacs/ESS combined with some code for the Emacs profile and/or a nice Makefile. But I would really like to hear about everybody's preferred way of creating Sweave and/or Latex documents.

Answer 1

A few other R users I talked to use a 'one-directory-per-project' setup, and a simple Makefile. As you suspected, that works well with Emacs/ESS.

I tend to just call a simple shell script sweave which I wrote before before 'R CMD Sweave' was added (as I find re-creating or copying the Makefile unappealing, YMMV). I also use Emacs and an auto-refreshing pdf viewer (like okular or kpdf). Emacs23 can preview pdf files directly too but I have yet to switch my work flow to that.

edd@ron:~$ cat bin/sweave
#!/bin/bash -e

function errorexit () {
    echo "Error: $1"
    exit 1
}

function filetest () {
    if [ ! -f $1 ]; then
       errorexit "File $1 not found"
    fi
    return 0
}


if [ "$#" -lt 1 ]; then
    errorexit "Need to specify argument file"
fi


BASENAME=$(basename $1 .Rnw)

RNWFILE=$BASENAME.Rnw
filetest $RNWFILE
echo "library(tools); Sweave(\"$RNWFILE\")" \
      | R --no-save --no-restore --slave

LATEXFILE=$BASENAME.tex
filetest $LATEXFILE && pdflatex $LATEXFILE