TeXnicle is my favourite editor for writing LaTeX documents. It is available for Max OS X.

So I’d like to use it when writing knitr‘s Rnw-files.

Rnw-files are LaTeX-files with embedded R-code in it. So Rnw-files need to be preprocessed. The result is a tex-file which will be compiled by pdflatex or xelatex.

Processing is done by so called engines. TeXnicle comes with a bunch of different engines. You can see them in preferences (hit ⌘-,) on tab “Typesetting”.

TeXnicle Engines

A new Enginge

So we need to create a new engine which does knitr’s preprocessing. Just copy an existing one.

Engines

The engines are stored in

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~/Library/Application Support/TeXnicle/engines

Use your favourite text-editor and add these lines:

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# sometimes the extension is missing ...
mainfile=${mainfile%%.Rnw}.Rnw
 
# Running knitr
export LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
/usr/bin/Rscript -e 'library(knitr); knit(\'${mainfile}\')'
 
 
mainfileTeX=${mainfile%%.Rnw}.tex
export TEXINPUTS=$TEXINPUTS:/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/share/texmf/tex/latex/

between these lines here:

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# Go to the working directory
cd '$projectDir'
############################
# Insert new lines here    #
############################
 
echo ' '
echo '***------------------------------------------------------------'
echo '*** Run $runNumber of $nCompile...'
echo '***------------------------------------------------------------'

Also change the following line from

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$ENGINE -synctex=1 -file-line-error --output-directory='$outputDir' -interaction=nonstopmode '$mainfile'

to

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$ENGINE -synctex=1 -file-line-error --output-directory='$outputDir' -interaction=nonstopmode '$mainfileTeX'

Save this new engine as xelatex_knitr.engine. Now you should see it in preferences after a restart of TeXnicle:

New Enginge

Using the new Engine

Now you can create a new TeXnicle-project. Create a new file in it and use the extension .Rnw.

New document

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\documentclass{article}
 
\begin{document}
 
\section{Great plot using ggplot of R}
 
<<message=FALSE, echo=FALSE>>=
library(ggplot2, quietly=TRUE)
 
ggplot(mtcars, aes(x=wt, y=mpg, color=factor(gear))) + geom_point() +
  ggtitle('Fuel Efficiency of 32 Cars') +
  xlab('Weight (x1000 lb)') + ylab('Miles per Gallon')
@
 
 
\end{document}

Last but not least you must choose the new engine for this project:

Choose the new engine

Hitting ⌘-r processes the Rnw-file and generates (hopefully) a pdf-file:

pdf output