Dynamically Generate PDF Reports with Sweave

Question

I'd like to generate a large number of reports. For simplicity, let's say I want to create 5 small pdf documents with only a simple title that cycles through a vector of names.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\newcommand{\dsfrac}[2]{\frac{\displaystyle #1}{\displaystyle #2}}
\author{Me}
\title{\Sexpr{print(namelist)}}
\maketitle
\end{document}

How would I go about cycling through the generation of these reports for:

namelist <- c("Tom","Dick","Harry","John","Jacob")

Thanks in advance!

PS: Bonus points for showing me how to define the name of the resulting PDF documents.

Answer 1

You can just call Sweave in a loop, as follows.

# Create the template file, "test.Rnw"
template <- "test.Rnw"
cat("
\\documentclass{article}
\\title{\\Sexpr{namelist[i]}}
\\begin{document}
\\maketitle
\\end{document}
", file=template)

# Parameters
namelist <- c("Tom","Dick","Harry","John","Jacob")

# Main loop: just compile the file, 
# it will use the current value of the loop variable "i".
for(i in 1:length(namelist)) {
  Rnw_file <- paste("test_", i, ".Rnw", sep="")
  TeX_file <- paste("test_", i, ".tex", sep="")
  file.copy(template, Rnw_file)
  Sweave(Rnw_file)
  system(paste("pdflatex --interaction=nonstopmode",  TeX_file))
}