duncantl/XDynDocs: Dynamic Documents with XML and XSL

XDynDocs is a package for working with structured documents with R. It uses a combination of R and Docbook to allow authors to create and then process documents to render them in HTML, PDF, FO and LaTeX. The documents can be transformed "statically" i.e. just rendering the current contents as the author wrote them, or dynamically in which case R code within the document is evaluated and the results inserted into the output document. The infrastructure allows static processing to be done both in R or externally using make files. The processing is highly extensible as it uses XML, XSL and facilities for combining R and XSL. It is relatively straightforward to change how XML elements are processed within R and/or rendered. One can also control the rendering via an extensive collection of parameters that govern the XSL transformations and also the evaluation of R code. The documents we promote and can operate on are significantly richer than simple linear documents (e.g. as with Sweave, odfWeave, etc.) They allow inclusion of many additional document elements such as branches or alternative approaches, elements that are intended for different readers. The documents can contain meta-information to make them interactive. The structured documents allow for additional manipulation to verify or augment the contents, e.g. find all references to R functions or classes or packages, correct misspellings of their names, add package names, etc. We can also generate the necessary help files for adding links to these references so that readers can read help interactively.

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("duncantl/XDynDocs")