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, reStructuredText and AsciiDoc. 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.