[ESS] Is ess supposed to help with Sweave documents?

[Thomas Lumley]

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Paul Johnson wrote:

> I was just learning how to do Sweave documents with Emacs & R.  I did not 
> find a simple 1-2-3 explanation of how this is supposed to go.
>
> It seems downright awkward. Am I doing this right?
>
> Open doc.Snw in emacs, fiddle that and save it, then do
>
> M-x R
>
> to start R,  then in the R session
>
>> Sweave("doc.Snw")
>
> it says the tex file is ready for latex, so in emacs I  open "doc.tex" and 
> run latex on that. If "doc.tex" is already open, I have to revert buffer, 
> then run latex on that.  Several times I accidentally edited the tex file, 
> when I should have been editing the Snw file.
>

I don't think you should open doc.tex -- since it is not intended to be 
edited, Emacs should be kept well away from it.

There seem to be two straightforward ways to work
  - invoke latex from within R
     Sweave("doc.Snw")
     system("latex doc.tex")
  which could easily be automated into a single function (or even done by 
ESS).

  - write a Makefile (which seems to be the popular approach), so you can
    just do
       make doc.pdf

The following is then a useful shell script to run Sweave
#!/bin/sh
echo "library(tools);Sweave('"$1"')" | R --vanilla --silent

 	-thomas