28.25 Adding a Flowchart

REVIEW LaTeX and R both support extensive capability for generating pictures. Here we use the (Soetaert 2020) package to draw a flow chart, something that is a common requirement in documentation. The simple example shows the process of converting a .Rnw file using knitr (Xie 2024) to a LaTeX file which can then be processed by pdflatex to generate the .pdf file. The result can be seen in Figure @ref(fig:knitr:knitr_diagram_flowchart).

# Load package from the local library into the R session.

library(diagram)

# Identify some names for the nodes of the flowchart.

names   <- c(".Rnw", ".tex", ".pdf")

# Set up the connectivity data.

connect <- c(0,       0,          0,
             "knitr", 0,          0,
             0,       "pdflatex", 0)

# Constract a connectivity matrix and plot the flowchart.

matrix(nrow=3, ncol=3, byrow=TRUE, data=connect) %>%
  plotmat(pos=c(1, 2), name=names, box.col="orange")
The knitr process to generate a pdf.

(#fig:knitr:knitr_diagram_flowchart)The knitr process to generate a pdf.

There are many more possibilities provided by diagram (Soetaert 2020) and if interested you can explore demo(plotmat) and demo(plotweb).

References

Soetaert, Karline. 2020. Diagram: Functions for Visualising Simple Graphs (Networks), Plotting Flow Diagrams. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=diagram.
———. 2024. Knitr: A General-Purpose Package for Dynamic Report Generation in r. https://yihui.org/knitr/.

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