[ESS] knitr

[Yihui Xie]

Yes, I did not expect partial evaluation when I designed knitr, and
this sounds like a good idea. Given the current design (parser +
evaluator + renderer), I do not think it is hard to allow partial
evaluation of a single chunk and return a character string for that
chunk. My question is what you are going to do with this partial
result; it is not a complete LaTeX document.

That being said, I believe the cache feature might be an alternative
solution. The main reason that you do not want to compile the whole
document is probably about speed. If you enable cache in knitr, it
will not take much time on R's side to knit the document. With a PDF
viewer like Evince (but not Adobe Reader), you can keep the viewer
open and stay at the page that you want to read; when you knit the
file again, the page will be updated, so it feels like you are only
knitting the current page.

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA


On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 7:58 AM, Michael Lawrence
<lawrence.michael at gene.com> wrote:
>
> It's probably both. It would be nice to have these types of features just
> when using knitr directly, and then ESS would provide an interface. For
> example, knitr could accept a character vector of chunk names to process. It
> would be nice to have a renderer that would not write to a file but rather
> return as a character vector what it would have written.
>