[R] [survey] R for Reporting - the R Output MAnager (ROMA) project

[Eric Lecoutre]

Hi R UseRs,

I am interested in providing Reporting abilities to R and have initiated a 
project called R Output MAnager (ROMA).
My starting point was my R2HTML package which provides (rough) HTML 
exportations. I began with trying to mimic it for LaTeX but fastly did 
realize that it was a bad idea.
Thus, I started again from scratch a new package and did spend a lot of 
time reading about this topic, looking at what other software do (SAS ODS, 
SPlus SPXML,...) and studying technologies and formats: XML+XLST, LyX, 
DocBook, RTF,...

What follows is a description of my plans. This email is targetted to 
interested useRs, in order to have a return on that.
It comes with a little survey at the end that will be useful to me to 
target my package.
If you are also interested in Reporting (Output, Formats, Exchange,...), 
please read the following and answer the survey.
If not, you can skip this message - apologies for sending it to R-help, I 
hope you don't mind.


---



As a matter of fact, I have implemented something that shows promises 
(according to me). Currently, from the following output description:


***
  data(iris)
  mm=as.matrix(iris[1:5,1:4])

  out = emptyContent()
  out = out + Section("A title here")
  out = out + diag(2)
  out = out + Comment("comment: yes!")
  out = out + list(un=1,pi)
  out = out + "Then a boolean:" + TRUE
  out = out + Section("Default matrix",level=2)
  out = out + mm
  out = out + Section("Custom matrix" + Footnote("It works!"),level=2)
  out = out + 
ROMA(mm,style="custommatrix",rowstyle=paste("color",row(mm)[,1]%%2,sep=""),align="left")
  out = out + Section("An other title")
  out = out + ROMAgenerated()    # ROMAgenerated is a predefined function
***

You can generate a proper HTML file by the following command:

 > Export(out)

(see result: http://www.stat.ucl.ac.be/ROMA/sample.htm)

The same "output object" could be exported to (tex+dvi+ps+pdf) with:

 >  Export(out,driver="latex")

(see result: http://www.stat.ucl.ac.be/ROMA/sample.pdf / Change extension 
for other formats: tex and ps)


--- Survey ---

IMPORTANT: ONLY DO REPLY TO ME, NOT TO R-HELP MAILING LIST

Simply fill in the questions you want to asnwer to:

1. I am interesting in Reporting abilities for R
     [ ] Definitively
     [ ] Rather Yes
     [ ] Rather No
     [ ] Not at all
	
2. I have some knowledge about those different formats / specifications
     [ ] rtf      [ ] LaTeX  [ ] LyX
     [ ] html     [ ] css    [ ] xHTML
     [ ] XML      [ ] XLST   [ ] DocBook
	
3. I have some knowledge about those tools
     [ ] SAS ODS
     [ ] SPlus SPXML library
     [ ] XLST + XLST-FO chain

4. I would be specially interested in the following formats (multiple 
choices possible)
     [ ] rtf
     [ ] tex
     [ ] lyx
     [ ] XML, with a DTD specific to R
     [ ] XML, with the DTD from SPlus (compatible with SPXML library)
     [ ] XML, DocBook flavor
     [ ] HTML + css (good xHTML)
     [ ] Word (doc)
     [ ] OpenOffice (oo)
     [ ] Plain text
     [ ] Other:

4bis: If several formats, the best (according to me and my needs) one would 
be: ____

5. The approach is to fully separate content from formating. So, XML would 
be an ideal output format. Nevertheless, few people who use R may also 
mater XLST to produce nice formatted output. Thus, a way to handle styles 
(bold, colors, fonts, etc.) from R would also be great. It may not be a 
priority. Statistical output do have some specific issues: mathematics, 
complicated tables, graphs, and so on. For each of the following items, 
please tell me how important the issue is for you:

	0: I don't need that (and think I will never need it)
	1: Not really important
	...
	5: Crucial - I can't leave without that point anymore
	
  5.1 - Beeing able to read the document in any OS:
  Importance: __

  5.2 - Having an object that describes the output within R (as in the 
example), so that I could add/remove things, reexport it
  Importance: __	

  5.3 - Beeing able to define basics formatting also within R (bold, 
colors, fonts, and so on)
  Importance: __	

  5.4 - Beeing able to include mathematics, as (La)TeX codes or MathML
  Importance: __	

  5.5 - Beeing able to build complicated tables, with merged cells, 
embedding lists, eventually sub-tables
  Importance: __	


6. Here are some conceptual objects that a report may contain. Are there 
any more you can think to which may be important?
	Tables (containing Rows and Cells), Lists, Titles, Footnotes, Comment, 
Abbreviations / Acronyms, Code, Links, Graphs, Layout  (to have 2 or 3 
columns), Mathematics (equations), Table of Contents, Index
	
	Other that could be added:
	

7. Two different tools allow to create "dynamic" or alike documents: Sweave 
(for LaTeX and HTML) and Rpad (HTML, with a server). I would be interested 
in beeing able to describe the structure of a document that would be 
exportable to:

  7.1 -  Sweave   [ ] Yes    [ ] No
  7.2 -  Rpad     [ ] Yes    [ ] No


If you are interested in contributing to the project, please let me know 
also. If many people do need XML representations, I think it would be great 
to have a guru in XLST abilities in the development team.

Thanks for attention,

Happy R,

Eric
	

Eric Lecoutre
UCL /  Institut de Statistique
Voie du Roman Pays, 20
1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium

tel: (+32)(0)10473050
lecoutre at stat.ucl.ac.be
http://www.stat.ucl.ac.be/ISpersonnel/lecoutre

If the statistics are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. -Edward 
Tufte