Creating a Quick Report with knitr, xtable, R Markdown, Pandoc (and some OpenBLAS Benchmark Results)

亦凉 2022-07-24 06:22 28阅读 0赞

To cut a long story short, I always wanted to write professional-looking documents (technical reports and potentially my thesis) with R codes. No more copy and paste. No more Microsoft Word. At the same time, I don’t feel comfortable with LaTeX. Somehow I found a workaround with [knitr][], [xtable][], [R Markdown][] and [Pandoc][].

I must say that my solution is far from perfect as I haven’t mastered the document layout configuration yet. But I did manage to get some satisfactory results (well, from a seasoned MS Word user’s point of view) with minimal R Markdown, xtable and knitr codes.

Instead of showing some dummy results, I created a simple report on R-25 benchmark results with two versions of [OpenBLAS][] (ver. 0.2.6-1: the default, 2-threaded version on my Linux and ver. 0.2.8-1: the latest, multi-threaded version which had been made available[recently][]). In short, the latest OpenBLAS performed slightly better in most of the R-25 tests but two. For more details, [download the full pdf here][].

The code-generated report looks like this …

[![Code-generated Report][]][Code-generated Report 1]

… which I think is pretty enough for a quick report. When I look at the source R Markdown file which is nothing but geeky plain text (see below), I just can’t find words to describe the awesomeness of knitr + xtable + pandoc. Thank you very much [Yihui][], [RStudio team][], [David, Charles][xtable] and [John][Pandoc].

[![input_rmd.png_zoom_2_resize_456_2C231][]][input_rmd.png_zoom_2_resize_456_2C231 1]

The codes are available on [Github][]. This was my first attempt to code a report, the code structure isn’t pretty enough for showcase but I had commented as much as possible. I hope you enjoy this blog post and give this code-generated report routine a try!

[knitr]: http://yihui.name/knitr/
[xtable]: http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/xtable/index.html
[R Markdown]: http://www.rstudio.com/ide/docs/authoring/using_markdown
[Pandoc]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
[OpenBLAS]: http://xianyi.github.io/OpenBLAS/
[recently]: http://www.r-bloggers.com/multi-threaded-openblas-backported-to-recent-ubuntu-releases/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RBloggers+%28R+bloggers%29
[download the full pdf here]: https://github.com/woobe/blenditbayes/raw/master/2013-08-easy-documentation/report.pdf
[Code-generated Report]: http://i0.wp.com/woobe.bitbucket.org/images/blenditbayes/2013-08-easy-documentation/output_pdf.png?zoom=2&resize=456%2C249
[Code-generated Report 1]: http://i0.wp.com/woobe.bitbucket.org/images/blenditbayes/2013-08-easy-documentation/output_pdf.png
[Yihui]: http://yihui.name/
[RStudio team]: http://www.rstudio.com/about/
[input_rmd.png_zoom_2_resize_456_2C231]: http://i2.wp.com/woobe.bitbucket.org/images/blenditbayes/2013-08-easy-documentation/input_rmd.png?zoom=2&resize=456%2C231
[input_rmd.png_zoom_2_resize_456_2C231 1]: http://i2.wp.com/woobe.bitbucket.org/images/blenditbayes/2013-08-easy-documentation/input_rmd.png
[Github]: https://github.com/woobe/blenditbayes/tree/master/2013-08-easy-documentation