Reproducible research with markdown, knitr and pandoc

Over the last few weeks I was trying to optimise my workflow using markdow in combination with knitr and pandoc. Knitr is a grea new package by Yihui, expanding R’s capabilities for reproducible research.

I will illustrate my work flow with the following example, where I have a small R-script (script.r) that I want to embed into a report. However, I do not want to write LaTeX, nor I want/can specify my final output format in the beginning. That is where were pandoc comes in. Pandoc is the swiss-army knife if come to convert between markup languages.

The file script.r:

## @knitr gen-dat
a <- matrix(rnorm(100), nrow=10)

## @knitr plot
 image(a)

The report is written with  pandoc flavored markdown. The file (report_knit_.md) contains

% A sample report
% The author
% `r date()`

<!-- Setting up R -->
`ro warning=FALSE, dev="png", fig.cap="", cache=FALSE or`

<!-- read external r code -->
```{r reading, echo=FALSE}
read_chunk("script.r")
```

# The first part of my R script
Here I can generate my data
```{r}
<<gen-dat>>
```

# Results
An now the reults are plotted
```{r plot-fig, result="asis"}
<<plot>>
```

# More
Of course I can use inline elemtnts: 3 + 3 = `r 3+3`.

For each chunk there are plenty of options to modify it (see options).

To render my report, I need to first knit it in R and then use pandoc to convert it to the final format. This can be done with

Rscript -e "library(knitr); knit('report_knit_.md')"

This results in a pandoc flavored markdown document. Now I can use pandoc to convert this document into all by pandoc supported output format (list of formats):

• A pdf file: pandoc -s report.md -t latex -o report.pdf
• A html file: pandoc -s report.md -o report.html (with the -c flag html files can be added easily)
• Openoffice: pandoc report.md -o report.odt
• Word docx: pandoc report.md -o report.docx

Files are available on github.