knitr: A General-Purpose Tool for Dynamic Report Generation in R

The original paradigm of literate programming was brought forward mainly for software development, or specifically, to mix source code (for computer) and documentation (for human) together. Early systems include WEB and Noweb; Sweave (Leisch, 2002) was derived from the latter, but it is less focused on documenting software, instead it is mainly used for reproducible data analysis and generating statistical reports. The knitr package (Xie, 2012c) is following the steps of Sweave. For this manual, I assume readers have some background knowledge of Sweave to understand the technical details; for a reference of available options, hooks and demos, see the package homepage http://yihui.name/knitr/.