R help - Sep 2007 - wordReport

?wordReport gives a lot of information, but I think it makes us wish for 
more :-)

Where can I find all the ways to write Word documents using R? 

Namely:

(1) is there any way to open a new document and save it automatically?
The sequence:

WordOpen("new_file.doc"); WordInsertText("R rulez!\n");
WordExit()

will prompt for the Yes/No/Cancel prompt, and if I answer "Yes", it
opens
the menu to "Save As".

(2) is there any way to write formulas in the evil Word formula format, but 
with input as decent latex-like format?

Alberto Monteiro

> Where can I find all the ways to write Word documents using R? 
There aren't many. Look at 

  http://www.user2007.org/program/presentations/kuhn.pdf

to get Word documents via OpenOffice.

Max

>From R, you can write an XML or HTML document and read it right into Word
in sufficiently new versions of Word.  Go into Word and save a sample
Word document in the format of your choice to see what it looks like.
Filtered HTML is particularly readable. Alternately, the R packages
RDCOMClient and rcom provide interfaces to Word's COM interface which
would presumably give you complete access to Word's facilities but would
be more work to program.

If you are using HTML then formulas would be included as images and
you can create images of formulas with R's graphic facilities which allows
the use of nice expressions to denote them.

There is also a latex2rtf program that will allow you to generate rich
text format files from latex that are readable in Word.

There may be some limitations to these methods so it would be worthwhile
prototyping anything first.

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Alberto Monteiro wrote:
> ?wordReport gives a lot of information, but I think it makes us wish for 
> more :-)
> 
> Where can I find all the ways to write Word documents using R? 
> 
Using either of the R/DCOM client packages (rcom and RDCOMClient)
you can access all the exposed functionality of Word to control
it and so create rich documents.  The number of classes and functions
is large, so it can take a little time to figure out what is available
but it is quite flexible.

wordReport appears to use Visual Basic commands to get the same
effect.  So if you don't mind going through an additional
"language", you could extend that to know provide access to more
of the same functionality that you get directly with the R/DCOM
connections.

One could also create the document in XML, either directly to
Word's XML format or to a different format and then transform it
with, e.g., XSL or other XML-capable tools (including R).


That's some of the ways.

> Namely:
> 
> (1) is there any way to open a new document and save it automatically?
> The sequence:
> 
> WordOpen("new_file.doc"); WordInsertText("R rulez!\n");
WordExit()
> 
> will prompt for the Yes/No/Cancel prompt, and if I answer "Yes",
it opens
> the menu to "Save As".
> 
> (2) is there any way to write formulas in the evil Word formula format, but
> with input as decent latex-like format?
> 
> Alberto Monteiro
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
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