XDynDocs

Last Release: 0.3-1 (03 Nov 2010)

This is an R package for working with and processing dynamic, reproducible documents using XML, XSL and R. It supports Docbook (with extensions for identifying R code and other markup elements) and Microsoft Word 2007 documents. The idea is that we take a document containing

Other packages providing similar or related facilities include:

Why is this package different? Firstly, it uses XML and XML-related technologies such as XSL, XPath, XInclude, catalogs and so on. This is a good thing as these are powerful, ubiqitous tools with a well-documented, rich, flexible, extensible format that can be used by many communities. Docbook is used in many projects for technical documentation, authoring books, and so on. Word is a widely used word processing tool that is more "convenient" for many users than LaTeX. Open Office and odfWeave are good tools, but Word is probably more widely used than Open Office. odfWeave primarily uses the Sweave syntax to identify code chunks (i.e. <<>>=). We use styles to introduce markup.

We use XSL to handle Docbook format. This provides a clear and rich means to extend and customize the processing for different targets, e.g. HTML, FO/PDF. There are a few features in this package that are different from odfWeave (but which could be added)

Somewhat tangential are the RDCOMClient, RDCOMServer, RDCOMEvents and rcom pacakges. I'll explain why these are relevant later.

RXHelp - a Docbook XML-based format for documenting R functions, classes, methods and data with richer content and more flexible tools than available in the current Rd format.

Duncan Temple Lang <duncan@wald.ucdavis.edu>
Last modified: Wed Nov 3 12:19:36 PDT 2010