R help - Apr 2012 - How do Sweave users collaborate with Word users?

Hello All,

I'm getting my workflow switched over to Sweave, which is very cool.
However, I collaborate with folks (as many of you must as well) who use
Word to Track Changes amongst a group while crafting a paper.  In the
simplest case, there will just be two people (one Sweave user and one
Word user) editing a paper.

I'm wondering, how do Sweave users go about this?  I could convert a
sweave file to a .docx easily enough via an intermediary pdf, rtf, html
or otherwise.  However, once the file has been marked up with changes,
the challenge is to migrate those (accepted) changes back to the sweave
document.  Perhaps the most straightforward way is to manually
back-propagate changes, but I imagine that could be a painstaking process.

Ideally, I imagine a tool that puts invisible tags in the word document
when it is originally produced from Sweave, and is then able to
propagate changes back to that sweave file after markup.  I'd be
pleasantly surprised if such a tool existed.

Perhaps there are other ways of making this work.  Any thoughts are
kindly appreciated!

Thanks,
Allie

I cannot reply in detail at the moment, but we have a proposal to the
Google Summer of Code this year which will address the collaboration
issue. The basic idea is to write everything in plain text with
markdown (including R code), and compile the file with the knitr
package, then convert it to Word or whatever other formats with
pandoc, which is an extremely powerful document converter. You can see
a simple example here for how knitr works with markdown:
http://yihui.name/knitr/demo/upload/ Since everything is in plain
text, it is easy to collaborate through a version control system like
SVN or GIT. Markdown is easy to write and cleaner compared to Word.

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name
Department of Statistics, Iowa State University
2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA



On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 3:54 PM, Alexander Shenkin <ashenkin at ufl.edu>
wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I'm getting my workflow switched over to Sweave, which is very cool.
> However, I collaborate with folks (as many of you must as well) who use
> Word to Track Changes amongst a group while crafting a paper. ?In the
> simplest case, there will just be two people (one Sweave user and one
> Word user) editing a paper.
>
> I'm wondering, how do Sweave users go about this? ?I could convert a
> sweave file to a .docx easily enough via an intermediary pdf, rtf, html
> or otherwise. ?However, once the file has been marked up with changes,
> the challenge is to migrate those (accepted) changes back to the sweave
> document. ?Perhaps the most straightforward way is to manually
> back-propagate changes, but I imagine that could be a painstaking process.
>
> Ideally, I imagine a tool that puts invisible tags in the word document
> when it is originally produced from Sweave, and is then able to
> propagate changes back to that sweave file after markup. ?I'd be
> pleasantly surprised if such a tool existed.
>
> Perhaps there are other ways of making this work. ?Any thoughts are
> kindly appreciated!
>
> Thanks,
> Allie
>
> ______________________________________________
> 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.

would it be possible to separate the parts generated by R from the
actually written paths? As creating small doc's by sweave which contain
the generated reports and embedding them via OLE into the static written
text. However, this could require sending around multiple documents
around each time...

You might want to consider SWord, which provides similar facilities for the
Word and R
user.  Word-oriented co-authors can modify the Word part of the document
without
impacting the R part of the document.

SWord is by Thomas Baier thomas@statconn.com, author of the statconnDCOM
interface
that is underneath RExcel.  See rcom.univie.ac.at for information and
download and to
sign up on the rcom email list.

Rich

On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 4:54 PM, Alexander Shenkin <ashenkin@ufl.edu>
wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I'm getting my workflow switched over to Sweave, which is very cool.
> However, I collaborate with folks (as many of you must as well) who use
> Word to Track Changes amongst a group while crafting a paper.  In the
> simplest case, there will just be two people (one Sweave user and one
> Word user) editing a paper.
>
> I'm wondering, how do Sweave users go about this?  I could convert a
> sweave file to a .docx easily enough via an intermediary pdf, rtf, html
> or otherwise.  However, once the file has been marked up with changes,
> the challenge is to migrate those (accepted) changes back to the sweave
> document.  Perhaps the most straightforward way is to manually
> back-propagate changes, but I imagine that could be a painstaking process.
>
> Ideally, I imagine a tool that puts invisible tags in the word document
> when it is originally produced from Sweave, and is then able to
> propagate changes back to that sweave file after markup.  I'd be
> pleasantly surprised if such a tool existed.
>
> Perhaps there are other ways of making this work.  Any thoughts are
> kindly appreciated!
>
> Thanks,
> Allie
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help@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<http://www.r-project.org/posting-guide.html>
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
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