Consider creating exams using the exams package in R.
When using exams2nops there is a parameter showpoints that, when set to TRUE will show the points of each exercise. However, for exams2pdf this parameter is not available.
How to display the points per exercise when using exams2pdf?
(The answer below is adapted from the R/exams forum at https://R-Forge.R-project.org/forum/forum.php?thread_id=33884&forum_id=4377&group_id=1337.)
There is currently no built-in solution to automatically display the number of points in exams2pdf(). The points= argument only stores the number of points in the R object that exams2pdf() creates (as in other exams2xyz() interfaces) but not in the individual PDF files.
Thus, if you want the points to be displayed you need to do it in some way yourself. A simple solution would be to include it in the individual exercises already, possibly depending on the kind of interface used, e.g., something like this for an .Rmd exercise:
pts <- 17
pts_string <- if(match_exams_call() == "exams2pdf") {
sprintf("_(%s points)_", pts)
} else {
""
}
And then at the beginning of the "Question":
Question
========
`r pts_string` And here starts the question text...
Finally in the meta-information
expoints: `r pts`
This always includes the desired points in the meta-information but only displays them in the question when using exams2pdf(...). This is very flexible and can be easily customized further. The only downside is that it doesn't react to the exams2pdf(..., points = ...) argument.
In .Rnw exercises one would have to use \Sexpr{...} instead of r .... Also the pts_string should be something like sprintf("\\emph{(%s points)}", pts).
Finally, a more elaborate solution would be to create a suitable \newcommand in the .tex template you use. If all exercises have the same number of points, this is not hard to do. But if all the different exercises could have different numbers of points, it would need to be more involved.
The main reason for supporting this in exams2nops() but not exams2pdf() is that the former has a rather restrictive format and vocabulary. In the latter case, however, the point is to give users all freedom regarding layout, language, etc. Hence, I didn't see a solution that is simple enough but also flexible enough to cover all use-cases of exams2pdf().
Related
The exams package is a really fantastic tool for generating exams from R.
I am interested in the possibilities of using it for (programming) assignments. The main difference from an exam is that besides solutions I'd also like hints to be included in the PDF / HTML output file.
Typically I put the hints for (sub)-questions in a separate section at the end of the PDF assignment (using a separate Latex section), but this requires manual labour. These are for students to consult if they need help getting started on any particular exercise, and it avoids having them look at the solutions directly for hints on how to start.
An assignment might look like:
Question 1
Question 2 ...
Question 10
Hints to all questions
I'd be open to changing the exact format as long it is possible to look up hints without looking up the answer, and it remains optional to read the hints.
So in fact I am looking for an intermediate "hints" section between the between the "question" and "solution" section, which is present for some questions but not for all.
My questions: Is this already possible? If not, how could this be implemented using the exams package?
R/exams does not have dedicated/native support for this kind of assignment so it isn't available out of the box. So if you want to get this kind of processing you have to ensure it yourself using LaTeX for PDF or CSS for HTML.
In LaTeX I think it should be possible to do what you want using the newfloat and endfloat packages in the LaTeX template that you pass to exams2pdf(). Any LaTeX template needs to provide {question} and {solution} environments, e.g., the plain.tex template shipped with the package has
\newenvironment{question}{\item \textbf{Problem}\newline}{}
\newenvironment{solution}{\textbf{Solution}\newline}{}
with the exercises embedded as
\begin{enumerate}
%% \exinput{exercises}
\end{enumerate}
Now instead of the \newenvironment{solution}... you could use
\usepackage{newfloat,endfloat}
\DeclareFloatingEnvironment{hint}
\DeclareDelayedFloat{hint}{Hint}
\DeclareFloatingEnvironment{solution}
\DeclareDelayedFloat{solution}{Solution}
This defines two new floating environments {hint} and {solution} which are then declared delayed floats. And then you would need to customize these environments regarding the text displayed within the questions at the beginning and the listing at the end. I'm not sure if this can get you exactly what you want, though, but hopefully it is a useful place to start from.
I’ve been looking for an hour, but everything I can find about how to make a nice looking table out of a data frame mentions that it’s for rmarkdown, html, or latex.
Is it not possible to make a nice looking table in base r?
plot(x, y) makes a graph.
Is there no function like: printTable(df)?
Broadly speaking over what you can get from a normal print in base::print there is not much else you can do. You could try to twist plot function to plot values from selected cells in a data frame but that would be very onerous to develop and impractical in the light of currently available and maintained solutions. There is a number of packages that let you achieve what you need. For instance you can try formattable by renkun-ken.
Example
For a simple example you can try formattable::formattable(mtcars[1:10,])
Creating Images
For a solution creating images from tables, have a look at this discussion. As discussed, in the linked answer if you insist on generating a static image you can use grid.table function offered via gridExtra: tbl <- grid.table(mtcars[1:5,]).
You may be interested in the flextable package that is very easy to use with multiple options to create nice tables.
You can also have multiple word, pdf, or html output types.
I invite you to check the manual : https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/flextable/vignettes/overview.html
There are a range of tools available for creating publication quality tables using R, Sweave, and LaTeX.
In particular, there are helper functions like latex in the Hmisc package, and xtable in the xtable package. I've also often written my own code so that I could have complete control over table formatting (e.g., see this example).
However, when preparing publication quality tables a range of issues often arise:
how and when to apply numeric formatting
how to precisely control alignment of columns and cells
how to precisely control cell borders
how to convert variable labels to variable names
and so on
Beyond the high level issues of specifying the desired table format, there are issues of implementation.
When should a helper function such as xtable be used?
Which helper function should be used in a given situation?
How can the default output of helper functions be customised to particular requirements?
Question
It seems to me that the above issues are deserving of a detailed textbook-style introduction.
Are there any online or offline resources that provide a detailed overview of how to produce publication quality tables using R, Sweave, and LaTeX, and that address the issues discussed above?
Just to tie this up with a nice little bow at the time of current writing, the best existant tutorials on publication-quality tables and usage scenarios appear to be an amalgamation of these documents:
A Sweave example (source)
The Joy of Sweave: A Beginner's Guide to Reproducible Research with Sweave (source)
Latex and R via Sweave: An example document how to use Sweave (source)
Sweave = R · LaTeX2 (source)
The xtable gallery (source)
The Sweave Homepage
LaTeX documentation
Going beyond the scope of what currently exists, you may want to ask the author of The Joy of Sweave for a document on publication-quality tables specifically. It seems like he's gone above and beyond this problem in his research. In addition to the questions you've raised, this space specifically could use a style guide that, flatly, does not currently exist.
And, as mentioned in the question errata, this is a perfect example of a question for https://tex.stackexchange.com/. I encourage you to continue to ask specific questions there when you run into any difficulties in your current projects.
The package stargazer can create publication-quality - incl. using templates designed to resemble existing academic journals - from commonly used R statistical functions and packages (lm, glm, plm, svyglm, survival, pscl, AER, and others). Also good for creating summary statistics tables, and can directly output data frame content as well.
There is a tabular function in the tables package which addresses formatting, alignment and label operations. The package has a vignette which is a good starting point.
xtable has worked fine for me so far.
In combination with siunitx, and when necessary, longtable, it can produce pretty effective tables, in my opinion. With packages like booktabs and caption, the aesthetics can be pleasing too.
I am not sure this level of detail was asked for by the OP, but for what it's worth, the basic implementation could be something along these lines: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/41067/caption-for-longtable-in-sweave/41183#41183 (my own answer to another question).
I highly recommend ConTeXt which makes use of the TABLE package. There is a Table overview in contextgarden and an exhaustive manual.
The answer to this question uses a PANEL variable which seems to be internal to ggplot. But searching the ggplot documentation and also Hadley Wickham's book, I can find no reference to it at all. Is this documented anywhere?
Also, looking at the code for stat_bin(...), there is evidently a vector count created (which contains the count of y for each unique x??). This is also accessible in aes(...) but, again, I can find no documentation.
So my question is: is there a place where all of these internal variables are documented, or must one just go to the code?
There are some surprising gaps in the help pages for ggplot2 (and I would point also to the help page for ?layer to which many other pages refer users as a particularly egregious gap.) These "variables" have been around for years and like you I cannot find much in the online help or the package NEWS. SO's search facility is not much help because it strips off the leading and trailing dots and shows everything with "count". Only examples of their use can be found in cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ggplot2/ggplot2.pdf. Google is somewhat more helpful and the search string of: ggplot2 ..counts.. delivers many informative hits. From context one forms that sense that these are not so much special variables as much as they are combined functions and program controls. These arguments implicitly transform the named arguments. They do seem to be implicitly mentioned in ?stat_bin {ggplot2} albeit without the dots, and it appears that all four of these stat-variable-functions are calculated at the same time.
When I did a search in the pdf you linked to I found on pages 57-58 tables (#4.3,4.4) of "statistics" and "aesthetics" that you were asking for, but to my surprise it did not include count. Those tables are in section 4.7 that describes "stats".
(I have noticed improvement or the last couple of years in some of the pages to which these complaints were directed.)
I think PANEL is a column in the component data of a plot. You get list of columns names:
names(ggplot_build(x)$data)
For the count and frequency variables, you can refer to Hadley book , page 69:
Both the histogram and frequency polygon geom use stat_bin. This
statistic produces two output variables count and density. The count
is the default as it is most interpretable. The density is basically
the count divided by the total count, and is useful when you want to
compare the shape of the distributions, not the overall size. You will
often prefer this when comparing the distribution of subsets that have
different sizes.
I'm in the process of documenting some of my functions for an R package I'm making.
I'm using roxygen markup, though that is largely irrelevant to my question.
I have put equations into my documentation using \deqn{...}. My question is:
Is there a way to cross-reference this equation later on?
For example, in my Rd file:
\deqn{\label{test}
y = mx + b
}
Can I later do something like:
Referring to equation \ref{test}, ...
I've tried \eqref{test}, \ref{test} (which both get "unknown macro" and don't get linked ), and also \link{test} (which complains it can't find function test because it's really just for linking to other functions).
Otherwise I fear I may have to do something hacky and add in the -- (1) and Refer to equation (1) manually within the \deqn etc in the Rd file...
Update
General answer appears to be "no". (awww...)
However, I can write a vignette and use "normal" latex/packages there. In any case, I've just noticed that the matrix equations I spent ages putting into my roxygen/Rd file look awful in the ?myFunction version of the help (they show up as just-about literal latex source). Which is a shame, because they look beautiful in the pdf version of the help.
#Iterator has pointed out the existence of conditional text, so I'll do ASCII maths in the .Rd files, but Latex maths in the pdf manual/vignette.
I'm compiling my comments above into an answer, for the benefit of others.
First, I do not actually know whether or not .Rd supports tagging of equations. However, the .Rd format is such a strict subset of LaTeX, and produces very primitive text output, that shoehorning extensive equations into its format could be a painful undertaking without much benefit to the user.
The alternative is to use package vignettes, or even externally hosted documentation (as is done by Hadley Wickham, for some of his packages). This will allow you to use PDFs or other documentation, to your heart's content. In this way, you can include screenshots, plots, all of the funkiest LaTeX extensions that only you have, and, most significantly, the AMS extensions that we all know and love.
Nonetheless, one can specify different rendering of a given section of documentation (in .Rd) based on the interface, such as text for the console, nice characters for HTML, etc., and conditional text supports that kind of format variation.
It's a good question. I don't know the answer regarding feasibility, but I had similar questions about documenting functions and equations together, and this investigation into what's feasible with .Rd files has convinced me to use PDF vignettes rather than .Rd files.