R Notebook: Include figures in report and save plots - r

I'm using an R Notebook and I'd like my plots to automatically save to disk when the code is run, as well as display inline.
knitr: include figures in report *and* output figures to separate files addresses this for R Markdown but the solution given doesn't work for an R Notebook. Is there a similar option for R Notebooks?

Try setting the knitr fig.path option:
knitr::opts_chunk$set(fig.path = "path/to/figures/")
Where path/to/figures/ is the path to a subdirectory where your figures will be saved. The trailing slash is necessary. This should be a relative path, either relative to the RNotebook file or to the project directory. See here::here() for a handy way to locate the project directory.
This will put each figure into that directory; figure names will be based on the chunk name (so name your chunks!)

This is what eventually worked for me (see #TCZhang 's answer to my question here):
In addition to setting the knitr chunk fig.path="figures/" option suggested by #DonJ, try setting output: html_document, or just press the dropdown next to the Preview [Notebook] button at the top and press Knit to HTML. I think the reason this isn't working is that your output is set to output: html_notebook.
I don't know why this doesn't work specifically when the doc is in R Notebook format. I would also prefer if this worked for output: html_notebook, so it might be an issue we need to open with RStudio or knitr.

Related

How to stop RStudio from rendering nb.html on save of an R Markdown document

RStudio renders mynotebook.nb.html file every time R Markdown document mynotebook.Rmd is saved. This process does not involve running code in chunks, so it is much faster than knitting a notebook into mynotebook.html. However, for large .Rmd documents, saving nb.html files can take a long time, and, unfortunately, it is required to wait for it to finish before one can start using the notebook again and run code in chunks.
Is there a way to configure RStudio to not to create nb.html files on save of an R Markdown document?
I've found out you can delete relevant output entry from the top section of your file. In my case it looks like:
---
title: "Document"
output:
html_notebook: default
---
Which causes creation of .nb.html on every save. If you remove the output tag, file is no longer created automatically. You can still knit to any output file from the Knit menu on the top (or press Ctrl+Shift+K for default. This will run all the chunks again, which may take a while.
You may want to consult this guide book for more information on how YAML tags work. I'm just beginning with them!
Another reason (and solution) might be, that you clicked incidentally on the "Knit on Save" button located just under the Save-to-Disk-Symbol in RStudio. This was in my case the problem. Usually you should be able to save a rmd-file without triggering the knitting process.
So - given this scenario - just uncheck the "Knit on Save" button.

knitR/RMD: select output folder

I'm using a RMD file to create a package vignette. My. rmd file is stored in
.../path_to_package/vignettes/vignette.rmd
When creating a PDF the last line in the R Markdown console window is "Output created: /tmp/....".
How is it possible to create the PDF directly in the vignettes folder and not in a /tmp/.. folder?
I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and R 3.3.0, rmarkdown 0.9.6 and knitr 1.13.
Regards,
Johannes
rmarkdown::render does indeed output to the same directory as the input folder by default, but you can override that by supplying an output_dir argument to it (and an output_file one if you'd like to specify a different filename to the input file too).
I'm not sure why the Knit button in RStudio is doing something different for you—in my case it also outputs to the same folder as the source (even when I haven't specified a working folder and my home directory is the default), and RStudio doesn't show the function it's calling when you click the button, so it's a little hard to be sure. I'd stick to using rmarkdown::render() with the specified arguments for now.
Instead use
devtools::build_vignettes()
It will automatically put the files where they're supposed to go. Also check out Hadley Wickham's guide. It rocks!

Knit2html not replicating functionality of Knit HTML button in R Studio

I'm trying to write a Bash script in Ubuntu 10.04 that opens a Python file which exports a CSV, and then runs the following Rscript with the goal of exporting a HTML with plots from Dashboard.Rmd:
require(knitr)
setwd('/home/sensors/Desktop/')
knit2html('Dashboard.Rmd')
browseURL('Dashboard.html')
Dashboard.Rmd is an R markdown that calls read.csv on the csv from the first step, makes a data frame and creates plots, but that part's working fine. According to this, I figure that Rscript should replicate the action of pressing "Knit HTML" in R Studio. However, the html it creates is identical to the last time Knit HTML was pressed; i.e. even if the CSV is different, the html doesn't reflect the change.
I also tried using a separate line for knit and markdownToHTML with the same effect. It seems like it doesn't source the code from the Rmd when performing knit. It does update the html properly when I enter the commands from that Rscript into the console of R Studio with Dashboard.Rmd open. However I'm not sure how to translate that into a Bash script. I also tried knit2html with envir=new.env(), envir=R_GlobalEnv, and envir=parent.frame() with no luck. Any help would be appreciated!
So it turns out that this was an artifact of cache=TRUE -- the HTML file was not changed because everything was cached.

How to convert R Markdown to HTML? I.e., What does "Knit HTML" do in Rstudio 0.96?

What commands are run when pressing "Knit HTML" on an R Markdown file in Rstudio 0.96?
My motivation is that I might want to run the same command when I'm in another text editing environment or I might want to combine the command in a larger makefile.
Basic Script
So now that the R markdown package has been released, here is some code to replicate the features of Knit to Html.
require(knitr) # required for knitting from rmd to md
require(markdown) # required for md to html
knit('test.rmd', 'test.md') # creates md file
markdownToHTML('test.md', 'test.html') # creates html file
browseURL(paste('file://', file.path(getwd(),'test.html'), sep='')) # open file in browser
where test.rmd is the name of your R markdown file.
Note that I'm not 100% confident about the browseURL line (hence my question here about opening files in a web browser).
markdownToHTML Options
The good thing about markdownToHTML is that there are heaps of options in how the HTML is created (see ?markdownHTMLOptions). So for example, if you want just a code fragment without all the header information, you could write:
markdownToHTML('test.md', 'test.html', options='fragment_only')
or if you don't like hard wrapping (i.e., inserting line breaks when there are single manual line breaks in the markdown source), you can omit the 'hard_wrap' option.
# The default options are 'hard_wrap', 'use_xhtml',
# 'smartypants', and 'base64_images'.
markdownToHTML('test.md', 'test.html',
options=c('use_xhtml', 'base64_images'))
Makefile
This could also all be added to a makefile perhaps using Rscript -e (e.g., something like this). Here's a basic example makefile I put together, where test indicates that the rmd file is called test.rmd.
RMDFILE=test
html :
Rscript -e "require(knitr); require(markdown); knit('$(RMDFILE).rmd', '$(RMDFILE).md'); markdownToHTML('$(RMDFILE).md', '$(RMDFILE).html', options=c('use_xhtml', 'base64_images')); browseURL(paste('file://', file.path(getwd(),'$(RMDFILE).html'), sep=''))"
The makefile uses my preferred markdown options: i.e., options=c('use_xhtml', 'base64_images')
Put Sys.sleep(30) in a chunk and you will see clearly what commands are called by RStudio. Basically they are
library(knitr); knit() to get the markdown file;
RStudio has internal functions to convert markdown to HTML;
The second step will be more transparent in the next version of the markdown package. Currently you can use knitr::knit2html('your_file.Rmd') to get a similar HTML file as RStudio gives you.
Update on 2019/09/17: The above answer applies to RStudio v0.96 (in the year 2012). Now R Markdown is compiled through rmarkdown::render(), which uses Pandoc instead of the retired R package markdown. See the post Relationship between R Markdown, Knitr, Pandoc, and Bookdown for more details.
Very easy command line method from knitr in a knutshell:
R -e "rmarkdown::render('knitr_example.Rmd')"
This requires rmarkdown to be installed with install.packages(rmarkdown) and that pandoc is installed (apparently it comes with Rstudio, see knitr in a knutshell for more details).
So far when I've used this it nicely puts all the plots in the HTML file rather than as images in a figure directory and cleans up any intermediate files, if any; just like compilation in RStudio does.
It seems you should call rmarkdown::render() instead of knitr::knit2html() because a.rmd appears to be an R Markdown v2 document.

practically getting started with Sweave

my question(s) might be less general than the title suggests. I am running R on Mac OS X with a MySQL database to store the data. I have been working with the Komodo / Sciviews-R for some time. Recently I had the need for auto-generated reports and looked into Sweave. I guess StatET / Eclipse appears to be the "standard" solution for Sweavers.
1) Is it reasonable to switch from Komodo to StatET Eclipse? I tried StatET before but chose Komodo over StatET because I liked the calltip / autosuggest and the more convenient config from Komodo so much.
2) What´s a reasonable workflow to generate Sweave files? Usually I develop my R code first and then care about the report later. I just learned today that there is one file in Sweave that contains R code and Latex code at once and that from this file the .tex document is created. While the example files look handily and can't really imagine how to enter my 250 + lines of R code to a file and mixed it up with Latex.
Is it possible to just enter the qplot() and ggplot() statements to a such a document and source the functionality like database connection and intermediate results somehow?
Or is it just a matter of being used to the mix of Latex and R code?
Thx for any suggestions, hints, links and back-to-the-roots-shout-outs…
You've asked several questions, so here's several answers;
Is StatEt/Eclipse the right way to do Sweave ?
Not nessarily (note: I'm an avid StatEt/Eclipse user, and use it for both pure R and Sweave/R and love it, I haven't used Komodo / sciviews-R). You should be able to run the sweave command from any R command line which will generate a .tex file. You can then turn the .tex file into something readable (like pdf) from any tex environment.
What's a good Sweave workflow ?
When I have wanted to turn an r script into a sweave report I generaly start with an empty sweave template and copy/paste my entire R script into a sweave R block just after the title, i.e;
<<label=myEntireRScript, echo=false, include=false>>
#Insert code here
myTable<-dataframe(...)
myPlot<-qplot(....)
#
Then I go through and find the parts I want to report. For instance, if i want to put a table into the report, I'll cut the R block and put an xtable block in, and the same for variables and plots.
<<label=myEntireRScript, echo=false, include=false>>=
#Insert code here
#
Put any text I want before my table here, maybe with a \Sexpr{print(variable)} named variable
<<label=myTable, result=Tex>>=
myTable<-dataframe(...)
print(xtable(mytable,...),...)
#
Any text I want before my figure
<label=myplot, result=figure>>=
myPlot<-qplot(....)
print(qplot)
#
You may want to look at these related SO posts. The rest of my post relates to your question 2.
When creating reports with Sweave, I usually keep most of the R code and the report text separate. If the R code is fast to run, then I prefer I will include something like the following at the start of the .Rnw file:
<<>>
source('/path/to/script.r')
#
On the other hand, if the R code takes a long time, I will often include something like the following at the end of the R script:
Sweave('/path/to/report.Rnw'); system('pdflatex report.tex')
That way, I can re-generate the report quickly, without needing to run all the R code again. Then, the only work R has to do in the Sweave file is print tables, make graphs and maybe extract a few figures.
Like nullglob, I prefer to keep the R and Sweave files separate, but I prefer to save the workspace with save.image() rather than to source() the file. This avoids running the R calculations with each .Rnw file compiling (and I always end up tinkering with the typesetting more than I'd like).
My general work flow is to do each paper/project in it's own folder with it's own R file(s). When the calculation side is "done", I save.image() to store all the workspace variables as-is.
Then, in the .Rnw file in the same directory I set the working directory with setwd() and load all variables with load(".Rdata"). Of course, you can change the name you use for your workspace, but I do one workspace per folder and keep the default name. Oh, and if you tinker with the R file, be sure save the workspace image and watch out for variables that linger in the workspace and .Rnw file, but are no longer part of the R file... this is where the save.image() approach can cause some headaches.
I am on a Mac and I suggest TextMate if you're mildly geeky and emacs/ess if you're really geeky. I use vim and command line R, but emacs/ess works best for most. If you're in this for the long haul, I doubt you'll regret learning emacs/ess for R, Sweave, and LaTeX.

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