Update August 5 2014: I noticed this post is getting some hits; please note that it is an old post, it’s probably outdated and there’s likely to be a better solution by now
People have been telling me for a while that the latest version of RStudio, the IDE for R, is a great way to generate reports. I finally got around to trying it out and for once, the hype is justified. Start with this excellent tutorial from Jeremy Anglim.
Briefly: the process is not so different to Sweave, except that (1) instead of embedding R code in LaTeX, we embed R code in a document written using R Markdown; (2) instead of Sweave, we use the knitr package; (3) the focus is on generating HTML documents for publishing to the Web (see e.g. RPubs), although knitr can also generate PDF documents, just like Sweave.
It took me a little while to figure out a couple of things. First, how best to generate HTML tables, ideally using the xtable package. Second, how to override the default RStudio/R Markdown style. I’ve documented those tasks in this post.
Read the rest…
What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate 