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Tools for generating reports

Recommendation

KT strongly recommends using R markdown over Jupyter notebooks.

Rationale

The main reasons for this recommendation are:

  • Works easily with both R and Python.
  • git-friendly.
  • Does not require a browser.
  • Can be edited in a good text editor instead of RStudio.
  • Easier to convert to other formats, especially manuscripts for submission.

But Jupyter is fine, too!

As always, there are exceptions to this rule! KT likes Jupyter notebooks, and they are the best/only game in town for generating interactive Python graphics.

R Markdown (and R Studio)

R Markdown is a "flavor" of markdown. The way most people use R markdown is within RStudio. Rstudio is an "integrated development environment", or IDE for the R programming language. It differs from "vanilla" markdown is that you can execute R code display graphics generated via R. With the reticulate package installed, you may also do the same with Python code.

More info on R markdown can be found in the section Generating content with R markdown on the main page.

Pros

  • An R markdown document is plain text, making it git-friendly.
  • As it is a plain text format, you can use whatever editor you like.
  • Works with both R and Python
  • Can generate various output formats, including HTML and PDF.
  • RStudio makes a nice "one stop shop" for a project using R.
  • RStudio has git integration!
  • The R markdown format can be the basis of slides, manuscripts, or books.

Cons

  • Different "flavors" of R markdown used for slides, books, etc., can have subtly different ways of doing specific things.
  • Documents are compiled from markdown to the output format from top to bottom. Thus, it can take some time to reprocess a large document.
  • RStudio is not straightforward to set up for remote work.

Jupyter Lab

Jupyter lab is a browser-based notebook application that supports many different languages, including R and Python. Its language agnosticism means that it is not an IDE for any language. Rather, it is a nice application for entering text and code and making reports, slides, etc..

Pros

  • Works with both R and Python
  • Can generate various output formats, including HTML and PDF.
  • Individual code "cells" can be executed in isolation, so you don't necessarily have to reprocess the entire document.
  • Can make very nice slides!

Cons

  • The notebooks are binary files. Thus, it is nearly impossible to see the differences between changes using git/GitHub. There are workarounds for this problem, but they aren't as good as plain text.
  • Inconvenient for generating output in the right format to submit as a manuscript for publication.
  • The browser requirement makes it difficult to use remotely. See here.