[ESS] Starting intro to literate programming/ESS/Org mode?

[Vincent Goulet]

Hi Kevin,

> Le 30 janv. 2025 à 11:36, Kevin Zembower via ESS-help <ess-help using r-project.org> a écrit :
> 
> What I'd like to learn is the technique of using Org mode, and, I
> think, RMarkdown to do literate programming without the overhead of
> learning LaTeX.

It really depends what you want or need to do. The R Markdown/Bookdown stuff is good to create web pages of mostly computing and graphics material. If you need to create PDF documents with a lot of math content (read: equations), you cannot escape the LaTeX "overhead". At its roots, Markdown is a simple language to do simple things. The Internet is filled with questions of the type "How do I do this in R Markdown" to which the answer sums up to: "include this piece of LaTeX in the code".

I consider myself a heavy user of literate programming: I use it for pretty much all my teaching material. And everything remains based on LaTeX and Sweave. The one other thing I'm happy I learned to streamline my workflow is 'make'.

HTH

Vincent Goulet
Professeur titulaire
École d'actuariat, Université Laval