More efficient R / Sweave / TeXShop work-flow?

Question

I\'ve now got everything to work properly on my Mac OS X 10.6 machine so that I can create decent looking LaTeX documents with Sweave that include snippets of R code, output, an

Answer 1

I had this same issue (I use Mac OSX) and I opted to download Eclipse Classic 3.6.2. and then installed the StatET plugin. It's a bit hairy to get set up but once you do this environment is nice because you can one-click compile your .Rwn Sweave document using pdflatex and set options for your favorite viewer so the .pdf automatically pops up when you compile like it does in TeXShop. You can do this in TeXShop as well, but TeXShop is lousy for debugging .Rnw files and it doesn't highlight the R-code in the .Rwn file. In Eclipse you can customize the syntax highlighting (not the greatest from the Texclipse end, but ok) so that you can easily distinguish between your R and LaTeX code. You can also launch the R console from within Eclipse and it has a graphical object browser. Anyway, I could go on. If you want details about how to get it all installed, message me.

Answer 2

I use either Aquamacs or Eclipse to do the editing of the .Rnw file, then I use the following shell function to compile & view it:

sweaveCache () {
  Rscript -e "library(cacheSweave); setCacheDir(getwd()); 
    Sweave('$1.Rnw', driver = cacheSweaveDriver)" && 
  pdflatex --shell-escape $1.tex && 
  open $1.pdf
}

Notice that I'm using the cacheSweave driver, which helps avoid constantly re-executing code sections that take a long time to run.

BTW, I'm also trying to switch over to Babel instead of Sweave; not sure which I'll end up using more often, but there are definitely aspects of Babel that I like.

Answer 3

I use a Makefile of the following form for my Sweave documents:

pdf: myfile.tex
    R CMD texi2pdf myfile.tex

myfile.tex: myfile.Rnw
    R CMD Sweave myfile.Rnw

Then I can build the document in one step in the Mac OS Terminal by running the command make pdf

I'm sure there is a way to bring this closer to your one-click goal in Mac OS X, but this works well enough for me.

Answer 4

If you are open to switching to a (paid) solution, TextMate has a Sweave plugin that takes you from .Rnw to PDF in one step: Sweave, typeset, and view. Combined with Skim, which can be configured to reload PDFs, it makes tweaking files pretty easy.

Answer 5

Guess I'm late to the party on this, but I put together a webpage that documents my Sweave workflow based on Eclipse (with one-touch sweave):

http://www.stanford.edu/~messing/ComputationalSocialScienceWorkflow.html