R help - Jul 2006 - Exporting tables to RTF?

Greetings.

Yesterday I managed to jury-rig a system to get a table out of R and  
import it into Nisus Writer Express (a word processor for Mac OS X).   
What I came up with is brittle, since it depends on an AppleScript  
script which has to be in a specific location and on no one touching  
the computer, since the AppleScript remotely controls Nisus Writer  
Express rather blindly and will make it do something wrong if  
everything is not exactly where it expects it to be.

There has to be a more robust way of doing this.

Ideally, I'd like to have R translate one of its tables into a table  
in an RTF file and then have Nisus Writer Express open the file.  Has  
anyone written any code to do the RTF file-writing part?  (I didn't  
find anything in CRAN.  The second part I can do easily enough.)

Alternatively, I could try to get rid of the external AppleScript and  
control Nisus Writer Express directly from R.  However, to do that, I  
need to use system() to pass commands to the shell to pass commands  
to AppleScript to pass commands to Nisus Writer Express.  I haven't  
gotten this to work because I haven't managed to figure out how to  
formulate the escape codes.  My AppleScript commands have to be in  
the form of:

tell application "Nisus Writer Express" to <do something or
other>

Can anyone tell me how to escape such statements so I can pass them  
to osascript (a shell program that runs AppleScript) and (by  
extension) pass them to system()?

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can provide.

Aaron

-----
Aaron Solomon (ben Saul Joseph) Adelman
E-mail:  Aaron.Solomon.Adelman at gmail.com, adelmaas at musc.edu
Web-sites:  http://weirdthingoftheday.blogspot.com/ , http:// 
people.musc.edu/~adelmaas/
AOL Instant Messenger & Yahoo! Messenger:  Hiergargo
ICQ:  258691118
Jabber:  Aaron.Solomon.Adelman at gmail.com

Greetings.

I'd like to thank everyone who responded to my original request.  I  
got something up and working very quickly.  I'm including the  
resulting function below in case anyone else wants to try something  
like this in the future so they can find it in the archives.

Aaron

-----

# nice.table
# This is a function which takes a table x, creates an RTF file  
containing the table, and opens it in Nisus Writer Express.
# Dependencies:  The R package xtable, textutil (command-line utility  
in Mac OS X 10.4)
# Also required:  Nisus Writer Express

# Arguments:
# x, caption, align, digits, display:  As in xtable.
# file:  The name of the output RTF file.  If not provided, then the  
caption is used for the name of the file, and the file is created on  
the Desktop.  If no caption is provided either, then the file will  
have the mysterious name "x.rtf".
# NA.string:  As in print.xtable.

# Bugs:
# Spaces in filenames don't come through properly.  A lot of this  
function is R passing commands to the shell.  If you want spaces in  
the file name, you must prefix them with "\\" to get them through the
R interpreter and the  shell.

nice.table <- function(x, caption=NULL, align=NULL, digits=NULL,  
display=NULL, file="", NA.string="N/A")
{	library(xtable)

	xx <- xtable(x, caption=caption, align=align, digits=digits,  
display=display)

	x_file_location <- "~/Desktop/"
	if(is.null(caption))
	{	x_file_name <- "x"
	} else
	{	x_file_name <- gsub(" ", "_", caption, fixed=TRUE)
		x_file_name <- gsub(":", "-", x_file_name)
		x_file_name <- gsub("/", "_", x_file_name)
	}
	html_x_path <- paste(x_file_location, x_file_name, ".html",
sep="")
	print.xtable(xx, type="html", file=html_x_path,  
caption.placement="top", NA.string=NA.string)

	if(file == "") file <- paste(x_file_location, x_file_name,
".rtf",
sep="")
	incantation <- paste("textutil -convert rtf -output ", file,
" ",
html_x_path, sep="")
	system(incantation)
	incantation <- paste("rm ", html_x_path, sep="")
	system(incantation)

	incantation <- paste("open -b com.nisus.NisusWriter ", file,
sep="")
	system(incantation)
}


-----
Aaron Solomon (ben Saul Joseph) Adelman
E-mail:  Aaron.Solomon.Adelman at gmail.com, adelmaas at musc.edu
Web-sites:  http://weirdthingoftheday.blogspot.com/ , http:// 
people.musc.edu/~adelmaas/
AOL Instant Messenger & Yahoo! Messenger:  Hiergargo
ICQ:  258691118
Jabber:  Aaron.Solomon.Adelman at gmail.com