A general-purpose package for dynamic report generation in R
Description
This package provides a general-purpose tool for dynamic
report generation in R, which can be used to deal with any type
of (plain text) files, including Sweave, HTML, Markdown and
reStructuredText. The patterns of code chunks and inline R
expressions can be customized. R code is evaluated as if it
were copied and pasted in an R terminal thanks to the evaluate
package (e.g. we do not need to explicitly print() plots from
ggplot2 or lattice). R code can be reformatted by the formatR
package so that long lines are automatically wrapped, with
indent and spaces being added, and comments being preserved. A
simple caching mechanism is provided to cache results from
computations for the first time and the computations will be
skipped the next time. Almost all common graphics devices,
including those in base R and add-on packages like Cairo,
cairoDevice and tikzDevice, are built-in with this package and
it is straightforward to switch between devices without writing
any special functions. The width and height as well as
alignment of plots in the output document can be specified in
chunk options (the size of plots for graphics devices is still
supported as usual). Multiple plots can be recorded in a single
code chunk, and it is also allowed to rearrange plots to the
end of a chunk or just keep the last plot. Warnings, messages
and errors are written in the output document by default (can
be turned off). Currently LaTeX, HTML, Markdown and reST are
supported, and other output formats can be supported by hook
functions. The large collection of hooks in this package makes
it possible for the user to control almost everything in the R
code input and output. Hooks can be used either to format the
output or to run a specified R code fragment before or after a
code chunk. The language in code chunks is not restricted to R
only (there is simple support to Python and Awk, etc). Many
features are borrowed from or inspired by Sweave, cacheSweave,
pgfSweave, brew and decumar.