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, and LaTeX formatting together. Unfortunately, I feel like my work-flow is a bit clunky and inefficient:

1. Using TextWrangler, I write LaTeX code and R code (surrounded by <<>>= above and @ below R code chunk) together in one .Rnw file.

2. After saving changes, I call the .Rnw file from R using the Sweave command

   Sweave(file="/Users/mymachine/Documents/Assign4.Rnw", 
           syntax="SweaveSyntaxNoweb")
   

   In response, R outputs the following message:

   You can now run LaTeX on ‘Assign4.tex’

   So then I find the .tex file (Assign4.tex) in the R directory and copy it over to the folder in my documents ~/Documents/ where the .Rnw file is sitting (to keep everything in one place).

3. Then I open the .tex file (e.g. Assign4.tex) in TeXShop and compile it there into pdf format. It is only at this point that I get to see any changes I have made to the document and see if it ‘looks nice’.

Is there a way that I can compile everything with one button click? Specifically it would be nice to either call Sweave / R directly from TextWrangler or TeXShop. I suspect it might be possible to code a script in Terminal to do it, but I have no experience with Terminal.

Please let me know if there’s any other things I can do to streamline or improve my work flow.

Answer 1

One-click Sweaving is easy to do in TeXShop using the Sweave.sh script by Gregor Gorjanc.
Get it from http://cran.r-project.org/contrib/extra/scripts/Sweave.sh and put it in your ~/Library/TeXShop/bin/ folder.

Then add the following files to your ~/Library/TeXShop/engines/ folder:

As Sweave.engine:

#!/bin/bash
~/Library/TeXShop/bin/Sweave.sh  -ld "$1"

As SweaveNoClean.engine:

#!/bin/bash
~/Library/TeXShop/bin/Sweave.sh  -nc -ld "$1"

You’ll have to set the permissions on Sweave.sh and the two engine files to allow execution.

To Sweave with one click, restart TeXShop after adding these files, open the Sweave document (with Rnw extension) and in the dropdown menu above the document window, change it from LaTeX to Sweave or SweaveNoClean.

BEWARE: The “Sweave” option wll clean up after itself, deleting all the extra files LaTeX and Sweave creates. If your file is called myfile.Rnw, this will include files called myfile.R and myfile.tex. So a word to the wise: make sure the basename of your Rnw file is unique; then nothing unexpected will be written over and then deleted.

The SweaveNoClean option does not clean up after itself. This makes sure you don’t delete anything unexpected; though it could still write over a file called myfile.tex if you Sweave a myfile.Rnw. This also doesn’t delete any graphics that have been created, in case you want to have them separate from your full typeset document.