R in Action

Appendix D. Creating publication-quality output

Research doesn’t end when the last statistical analysis or graph is completed. We need to include the results in a report that effectively communicates these findings to a teacher, supervisor, client, government agency, or journal editor. Although R creates state-of-the-art graphics, its text output is woefully retro—tables of monospaced text with columns lined up using spaces.

There are two common approaches to creating publication quality reports in R: Sweave and odfWeave. The Sweave package allows you to embed R code and output in LaTeX documents, in order to produce high-end typeset reports in PDF, PostScript, and DVI formats. Sweave is an elegant, precise, and highly flexible system, but ...