Changing the Sweave driver from the command line

Question

My current Makefile for weaving looks something like:

SUFFIXES: .tex .pdf .Rnw
MAIN = lecture
INCLUDES = chapter1.tex chapter2.tex ...

all: $(INCLUDES) $(MAIN).pdf

$(MAIN).pdf: $(INCLUDES) $(MAIN).tex

.Rnw.tex:
        R CMD Sweave $*.Rnw

.tex.pdf:
        pdflatex $*.tex


<snip>

Suppose I want to change the Sweave driver to use the highlight package (say). What's the best way of doing this?

Answer 1

You could do what we do for the Rcpp* packages. Here is RcppGSL:

RcppGSL.pdf: RcppGSL/RcppGSL.Rnw
    cp -f RcppGSL/RcppGSL.Rnw .
    $(RSCRIPT) --vanilla -e "require(highlight); \
                             driver <- HighlightWeaveLatex(boxes = TRUE); \
                             Sweave( 'RcppGSL.Rnw', driver = driver ); "
    $(RSCRIPT) -e "tools::texi2dvi( 'RcppGSL.tex', pdf = TRUE, clean = FALSE )"
    bibtex RcppGSL
    $(RSCRIPT) -e "tools::texi2dvi( 'RcppGSL.tex', pdf = TRUE, clean = TRUE )"
    cp RcppGSL/RcppGSL-fake.Rnw RcppGSL.Rnw

This keeps the actual source and a 'fake' variant in a subdirectory inst/doc/RcppGSL/ to trick R into recreating the pdf only when we want it too---otherwise it sees an Rnw and pdf of the same basename and is happy.

A little more convoluted than the basic Makefile you started with, but currently still the only way to switch to highlight that we know.