Thursday, August 18, 2016

Typesetting Sweave documents with bibliographies

When you just have to make a quick plot, you can script R on the console, but when you do an experiment and want to be able to reproduce it, scripts are no good. I architect a solution and then use an IDE like RStudio to write a program. Once I have the wrangling and helper functions working the way I need, I copy them from their R files into a Sweave template and continue from there.

Today I got stuck because I was using a bibliography and RStudio could not typeset it.

It turns out, that RStudio just appears to run the LaTeX typesetting command, not the pdflatexmk script, so Biber is not called. When you want to work fast and just point and click instead of typing on the command line, you double-click on the tex file and typeset it in TeXShop.

Unfortunately, that does not work out-of-the-box because the Sweave package is part of the R distribution but not the TeXLive distribution. The solution is to make a copy of the two Sweave style files in your local TeXLive texmf directory. Here are the four steps for the current MacOS versions:

  1. go to /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/share/texmf/tex/latex
  2. copy Rd.sty and Sweave.sty
  3. go to ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex and paste the two files
  4. do a sudo texhash

Now you can typeset your Sweave documents both in Studio and TeXShop. The latter is handy only when you need to redo the bibliography, glossary, or index: you can keep working just in RStudio.

The very first line in your LaTeX file, before the class declaration, should be

% !TEX TS-program = pdflatexmk

Quantile-Quantile Plot

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