I am new to R and Rmd and trying to generate a report using Rmd. This report has several images inserted along with the text. I am able to insert an image by hardcoding the path of the image. I have no problems with that but I need the path as a variable because it varies with the project. Can anyone help me with the syntax for calling a variable within a path to the image?
"Project123" changes based on the project. Is there a way I can declare this variable and call it to define the path?
Help please.
Images can use online R code for dynamic paths and/or alt text. (Early adopters of rmarkdown often tried this method as the default method of including R plots in the reports, using png(filepath...); plot(...); dev.off() followed by what I recommend you use.)
This will allow you to do what you need:
as raw markdown (and not inside a traditional code chunk).
If you aren't familiar with inline code blocks, then know that you can put just about anything in an inline code block. This is handy for including dynamic content in a paragraph of text, for example "the variance of the sample is \r var(sample(99))``". (Often it is just a pre-created variable, if numeric it is often rounded or formated to control the display of significant figures.)
I have been writing a document in bookdown where within the *.Rmd file I call a figure by using the following syntax
\#ref(fig:MyFigureName)
This differs slightly from the notation that you would use in a normal RMarkdown file exporting to latex which would be
\ref{fig:MyFigureName}
The issue I am running into is that when I write something in bookdown the function calling the Figure is not being highlighted properly (see image below).
I have imported my own rsTheme (which is from my understanding, basically a .css file) but I don't see an option to add keywords to highlight.
But I would like for the entire function to be colored differently from the inline text (Photoshop version of desired output shown below)
Does anyone know how I would edit my *rsTheme file in order to accomplish this?
Thanks!
I would like to be able to use knitr to produce a structured PDF file. I did not see anything unless the input file is Sweave format. This question may be too vague but I really like to know right from knitr, is it possible to create a structured PDF output file without using any Sweave or LaTeX?
Try using command knit2pdf if you haven't already.
Is there a simple way to create R documentation file for simple R functions?
I know I can edit a .Rd file in R-studio and preview it in HTML file. But how to put it into latex to edit and preview? Is there some latex package producing R documentation format?
There is the Rd2latex function in the tools package that will convert from the .Rd format to LaTeX format. This will let you preview the documentation in LaTeX. However this does not allow converting edits to the LaTeX document back to the .Rd document.
Look at Sweave, maybe it helpful for you.
Sweave is a tool that allows to embed the R code for complete data analyses in latex documents.
The purpose is to create dynamic reports, which can be updated automatically if data or analysis change. Instead of inserting a prefabricated graph or table into the report, the master document contains the R code necessary to obtain it. When run through R, all data analysis output (tables, graphs, etc.) is created on the fly and inserted into a final latex document.
The report can be automatically updated if data or analysis change, which allows for truly reproducible research.
Check out printr http://yihui.name/printr/ . It should do what you need if you are using knitr.
The problem with Rd2latex is that i haven't figured out which style file I need to use, otherwise it works fine.
When you generate the latex code with the Rd2latex function, make sure that you copy the Rd.sty file from the R directory, paste it and somewhere that latex can see it and use \usepackage{Rd}.
Try the knitr package, an easy way to generate flexible and fast dynamic reports with R for LaTex.
If I load data(mtcars) it comes with a very neat codebook that I can call using ?mtcars.
I'm interested to document my data in the same way and, furthermore, save that neat codebook as a pdf.
Is it possible to save the 'content' of ?mtcars and how is it created?
Thanks, Eric
P.S. I did read this thread.
update 2012-05-14 00:39:59 PDT
I am looking for a solution using only R; unfortunately I cannot rely on other software (e.g. Tex)
update 2012-05-14 09:49:05 PDT
Thank you very much everyone for the many answers.
Reading these answers I realized that I should have made my priorities much clearer. Therefore, here is a list of my priorities in regard to this question.
R, I am looking for a solution that is based exclusively on R.
Reproducibility, that the codebook can be part of a automated script.
Readability, the text should be easy to read.
Searchability, a file that can be open with any standard software and searched (this is why I thought pdf would be a good solution, but this is overruled by 1 through 3).
I am currently labeling my variables using label() from the Hmisc package and might end up writing a .txt codebook using Label() from the same package.
(I'm not completely sure what you're after, but):
Like other package documentation, the file for mtcars is an .Rd file. You can convert it into other formats (ASCII) than pdf, but the usual way of producing a pdf does use pdflatex.
However, most information in such an .Rd file is written more or less by hand (unless you use yet another R package like roxygen/roxygen2 help you to generate parts of it automatically.
For user-data, usually Noweb is much more convenient.
.Rnw -Sweave-> -> .tex -pdflatex-> pdf is certainly the most usual way with such files.
However, you can use it e.g. with Openoffice (if that is installed) or use it with plain ASCII files instead of TeX.
Have a look at package knitr which may be easier with pure-ASCII files. (I'm not an expert, just switching over from Sweave)
If html is an option, both Sweave and knitr can work with that.
I don't know how to get the pdf of individual data sets but you can build the pdf of the entire datasets package from the LaTeX version using:
path <- find.package('datasets')
system(paste(shQuote(file.path(R.home("bin"), "R")),"CMD",
"Rd2pdf",shQuote(path)))
I'm not sure on this but it only makes sense you'd have to have some sort of LaTeX program like MikTex. Also I'm not sure how this will work on different OS as mine is windows and this works for me.
PS this is only a partial answer to your question as you want to do this for your data, but if nothing else it may get the ball rolling.
The help page that is displayed when entering ?mtcars is generated from an .Rd file, which is a LaTeX-like file that is used for all of R's help pages. Although .Rd files are LaTeX-like, you don't actually need to know LaTeX to read or write them. The actual mtcars.Rd file is available here: http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/jthetzel-public/mtcars.Rd , which can be viewed with any text editor.
.Rd files included in the ./man directory of a package are converted to .html files when installing the package. They are converted by functions in the "tools" package.. If you would like functionality like ?mtcars for your datasets, you would need to create a package for them. That might sound complicated if you have never created a package before, but it is easy enough to learn and will make you a better R programmer. There are a number of examples of dataset-only packages on CRAN, for example msProstate: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/msProstate/index.html . Consider downloading the package source to see how it is organized.
For more information on creating your own packages, writing .Rd files, and building packages:
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-exts.html, especially "1.1.5 Data in packages".
Edit
And if you want to convert the .Rd file in your package to a .pdf, you can do so when building your package, but you will need a LaTeX compiler. If you are on Windows, see here: http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/ .
You can't create a PDF with just R; you need to use other software that creates PDFs.
You could use a combination of utils::promptData, tools::Rd2HTML, and a simple custom function to open the created HTML file in the users' browser.
It would probably be easier to just make a package containing your data sets. Look at the "datasets" package for an example.
It looks like that if you want to generate a pdf, an external tool like LaTeX is always needed. I would recommend using a simple ASCII text format to generate such a file. In principle the .Rd files are also ASCII text, but I do not find them particularly readable.
Instead, I would recommend using a plain text ASCII format such as Markdown (which is e.g. used on StackOverflow) to write the text file. Such a file is already much more readable than an .Rd formatted file, and as a bonus it can quite easily be processed into a PDF should you choose to do so later on. The knitr package I think is capable of generating PDF files from Markdown sources. In addition, knitr allows you to mix in R code in the Markdown text. This code can be evaluated and the results (even figures) added to the resulting PDF.
In practice you can use sprintf to generate character vectors that you can pipe to a file in order to dynamically generate the markdown text. Just write the template one time, and mark the places for the text you want to add later like this:
base_text = "
First header
============
This document was generated on %s, by %s.
"
text_forfile = sprintf(text, some_date, some_name)
Just dump the text in text_forfile to a .md file and your done, no external tools needed. See this post on SO for how dump text to a file.