How to create reports in R without texi2dvi or tex?

Question

Today I tried my best to try to figure out how to create reports in R using Sweave or Brew. At first I have to say that I have not used Tex before, but I understand its logic.

I read this document several times. However, I cannot even get a simple example for parsing. Brew successfully converts a simple markup file (only a header and some text) into a .tex file (no errors). But it never converts tex to pdf.

> library(tools) > library(brew) > brew("population.brew", "population.tex") > texi2dvi("population.tex", pdf = TRUE) 

The last step is always crashing:

  Error in texi2dvi("population.tex", pdf = TRUE) : Running 'texi2dvi' on 'population.tex' failed. 

What am I doing wrong?

The report I'm trying to build is pretty simple. I have 157 different analyzes to summarize. Each of them has 4 graphs, 1 table and a summary. I just want to

 output plot 1,2,3,4 output table \pagebreak ... 

what he. Can anybody help me? I use osx, I do not have Tex installed.

thanks

Answer 1

If you are on OSX, you can also install the full version of tex live

http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/mac/mactex/MacTeX.mpkg.zip

This is a big download, but it would be nice to never install additional packages.

Answer 2

You cannot run this without texi2dvi or tex.

An alternative could be a html output - a hwriter is useful for this.

However, if you want to create a pdf file, Sweave is the way to go. The Frank Harrell website contains a lot of useful information, but it requires a little familiarity with LaTeX, so you may need to install and learn this first.

Answer 3

Another solution: the ascii package in conjunction with your favorite markup language (asciidoc, txt2tags, restructured text, org or textiles).

http://eusebe.github.com/ascii/

Answer 4

Another solution is to try connecting R to Microsoft.

This is much weaker than Sweave, but for a basic report it might be what you need.

You might want to check out the examples here: Exporting R output to MS-Word using R2wd (session example)

Answer 5

It might be worth spending a week or so just by using LaTeX without R and going through a bunch of LaTeX introductory tutorials. Thus, when you start creating Sweave or Brew documents and you get errors, you can better determine if an error from LaTeX or Sweave / Brew occurs. Several Windows tools that make LaTeX easier to use include MikTeX + TeXnicCenter or MikTeX + WinEdt.

Answer 6

I also heard a lot of good about the knitr package. It seems to be very similar to Sweave, but adds a little more. I would definitely look at him.