# [R] Sweave and Slides (Beamer)

From: Brett Presnell <presnell_at_stat.ufl.edu>
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2011 21:11:00 -0400

I'm posting this for two reasons: one is to see if anyone has a better way of solving the problem or suggestions for improving my existing approach; and the other is to show what I'm currently doing in case anyone else might find it useful.

The background is that I've been using Sweave for several years now to produce class notes, and I sometimes include quite a lot of raw R input and output in those notes. My main motivation for doing this is to demonstrate to the students how to use R to do whatever sort of data analysis is under discussion, but it seems that the R code and output often helps to them to grok concepts as well (I was gratified recently when one of my undergrads said "It's time to see some R code!" when he was having trouble understanding something in my lecture on loglinear models).

Of course, when creating "slides" (e.g., in LaTeX's beamer class), one often needs to exert more control over the formatting of R's output than would otherwise be the case, and having relatively streamlined ways of doing this can save a lot of very annoying and mind-numbing work. The main issue I'm interested in here is controlling page breaks for a verbose command whose output will be spread over several slides. This comes up most commonly for me with summary(fit), where fit is a fitted model object, so I will use that as an example, but the same code works for other things. What I do in such a case is predicated on the notion that I usaully want page breaks to occur at blank lines in the output, and beyond that I expect to have to exert some manual control.

My current "solution" is to include near the top of my Rweave file a code chunk labeled "paragraphs" which I have included at the bottom of this message. (Of course I also have Sweave's keep.source option set to TRUE.) Then I do something like the following to spread the "paragraphs" of output across two slides in this case:

\begin{frame}[containsverbatim,allowframebreaks]

<<>>=
AC.AM.CM <-
glm(Freq ~ alc*cigs + alc*mj + cigs*mj,

family=poisson, data=teens.df)
@ %def

<<eval=FALSE>>=
summary(AC.AM.CM)
@ %def

<<echo=FALSE>>=
tmp <- paragraphs(summary(AC.AM.CM))
tmp[1:2]
@ %def

\break

<<echo=FALSE>>=
tmp[3:length(tmp)]
@ %def

\end{frame}

The output for this example (Example 7.1.6 of Agresti's "Introduction to Categorical Data Analysis") is relatively short, but for more complicated models such output can spread it over 3 or 4 slides. You can substitute your own example of course. Here I was trying to show the students exactly what they would see if they were running this code themselves, but in other places I might intersperse explanatory text between the "paragraphs" of output, and I might leave out some paragraphs altogether; both of these things are easily done in the obvious way.

So, is this useful to anyone besides me? What trick(s) am I missing that would make it easier/better, or that would obviate altogether the need for such manipulations?

Here's the code defining the paragraphs stuff. Suggestions for improvement are welcome. This was hacked together in desperation a couple of weeks ago and in the middle of the night, so I don't doubt that it can be improved.

<<paragraphs,echo=FALSE>>=
## Something for breaking up long output into "paragraphs". paragraphs <- function(x) {
text <- capture.output(x)
blanklines <- (1:length(text))[text == ""]   if (blanklines[1] != 1) blanklines <- c(-1,blanklines)   parstarts <- blanklines + 1
parends <- c(blanklines[-1] - 1, length(text))   npar <- length(parstarts)
res <- list()
for (i in 1:npar) res <- c(res, list(text[parstarts[i]:parends[i]]))   class(res) <- c("paragraphs", res\$class)   res
}
as.paragraphs <- paragraphs
assign("[.paragraphs",

       function(x, ..., drop = TRUE) {
cl <- oldClass(x)
class(x) <- NULL
val <- NextMethod("[")
class(val) <- cl
val
})


print.paragraphs <- function(x, ...) {
for (i in 1:(length(x))) {
cat(x[[i]], sep="\n")
cat("\n")
}
invisible(x)
}
@ %def
--
Brett Presnell
Department of Statistics
University of Florida

______________________________________________
R-help_at_r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help