[ESS] Integration of pandoc using polymode+knitr

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Thu, 27 Mar 2014 01:03:15 -0500 writes:

    > Hi Mathieu,
    > Sorry for the late reply. The rmarkdown package has made a lot of
    > efforts in generating attractive output by default, including HTML and
    > PDF output, etc. For example, HTML output uses Bootstrap 3 and you can
    > easily switch themes.

Well, rmarkdown is not a CRAN package... and it seems is really
tied to the Rstudio company.
It looks to me one way to have people flock to using RStudio everywhere..

    > I know it may be a very bad idea to suggest the RStudio IDE in the ESS
    > mailing list, 

yes...  ;-)

    > but I still recommend you to try it out. It is super
    > easy to go from an R Markdown document to other output formats. You do
    > not have to remember the Pandoc arguments -- there is a configuration
    > wizard and a little document setting button. Well, I know GUI's
    > probably do not make sense here...

    > Regards,
    > Yihui
    > --
    > Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
    > Web: http://yihui.name


    > On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 9:19 PM, Mathieu Basille
    > <basille.web at ase-research.org> wrote:
    >> Dear Yihui,
    >> 
    >> Le 03/11/2014 10:04 PM, Yihui Xie a écrit :
    >> 
    >>> I'm glad that your problem was solved. Just as Ahmadou
    >>> mentioned, we
    >>> are heading towards rmarkdown (http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com),
'we' ==?== Rstudio employees, or ??
I'm really getting a bit concerned here.
I liked Rstudio when it was *.org, and have been getting
increasingly nervous, now that it has been *.com ...

As mentioned above, why should we suddenly have to work with a non-CRAN package?
Also, is 'rmarkdown' (as a standard) something to be defined outside of the
Rstudio web site any time soon?
I've started using *.Rmd (and Rstudio to some extent) in
teaching, but I'm really having concerns more and more.

    >>>  which is a nice alternative to knitr::pandoc().

Then, knitr is a CRAN package with GPL licence,
so we can rely that it will continue to be available into the future.
(Ok, I see that rmarkdown also has a GPL licence.. and it is on
 github, just not on CRAN, and it contains 8.5 MB of source code,
 most of which is java script ... ... )

    >> would be fairly easy to use any other function, such as rmarkdown::render
    >> instead of knitr::pandoc. As for me, as I already use knitr (obviously) to
    >> knit, and pandoc is also installed on my system, it makes more sense to use
    >> what's available! 

and what is simple and modular..  The rmarkdown with all its new
bells and whistle and huge amounts of non-R source code, has its
advantages but also its drawbacks in my view.

Martin

    >> Or maybe I'm missing the obvious: is there a strong
    >> argument in favor of rmarkdown::render instead of knitr::pandoc?
    >> 
    >> Mathieu.