Commence great gnashing of teeth

[rebeccmeister]

So, I run the same flavor of somewhat cumbersome statistical analysis in R, over and over again, to the point where it would be really nice to automate certain aspects of the process, especially the aspect where I wind up doing a bunch of annoyingly fiddly formatting in a Word document at the end, after retyping a huge bunch of numbers in a crosseyed fashion (I'm fairly good and anal-retentive about this, but you can see how a person would make annoying mistakes that could be avoided). This eats up hours and hours of my life at times.

At the moment, I'm trying out the 'xtable' package, which will generate output in LaTeX or html. I don't have any LaTeX experience, so I'm going with html for the moment while I try and see if this whole enchilada will work for me. Which means that it looks like I'll be getting to embed a bunch of html tags into sections of my R code, which is just UGLY. Grr.

Plus, character manipulation. I need to compact down my F-statistics, so cells in the table look like so:

F_a,b=c,
P=d

Where the lowercase letters are numbers drawn from specific places, and the bolding of the whole thing is conditional on the P-value (bold if P < 0.05; italicized if 0.05 < P < 0.10)

It's just...ugly.

/whining

Comments

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

If you end up going back to the LaTeX route, there is this Math into LateX [pdf] book. I spent too much time mucking about websites instead of reading a book on the topic.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I also have a latex book or two I'd be willing to send, insofar as I think I'm unlikely to use them in the near future.

Or hey maybe we'll actually get off our butts and just drive them out there.

[rebeccmeister.livejournal.com]

Thank you to both you and altamira16 for the offers. Things have to eventually be embedded in tables in Word documents so my collaborators will look at them, so from what I quickly saw, it seemed like html would embed perfectly smoothly. I just can't get over having to include html tags in my R code - it's the impurity that bugs me. :-P