Writing big documents with Sweave. Is it possible to do as with LaTeX?

Question

I am just discovering Sweave and R. I have seen some examples of Sweave documents and have also started to write one or two on my own. I a

Answer 1

I'm using Sweave to write a book with about 16 chapters. I agree that using a makefile with multiple Rnw files is a good idea. One other nice thing abut this approach is that make can be run in parallel (-p I think), so depending on how the chapter's objects depend on each other, you can run a lot of code simultaneously.

The thing that has made a difference for me is caching. Several of my code chunks can run for days but have not changed over the course of writing the book. There are a few packages that allow you to save the results when it is run and only re-run the chunk if the objects that the chunk depends on have changed.

There are a few packages to do this. See:

http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/ReproducibleResearch.html

I use the weaver package form Bioconductor.

While I'm on a brain dump... if you have more than one author, I found that a shared Dropbox account is an excellent way of maintaining the project.

Max