The first Kölner R user meeting was great fun. About 20 useRs had turned up to exchange their ideas, questions and experience with R. Three talks about R & Excel, ggplot2 & XeLaTeX and Dynamical systems with R & simecol had kicked off the evening, with Kölsch (beer) losing our tongues further. Thankfully a lot of people had brought along their laptops, as unfortunately we lacked a cable to connect any of the computers to the installed projector.
Using R with LaTeX via Sweave is a great way to create reproducible output. However, using specific fonts, e.g. your corporate fonts, can be painful with pdflatex. Over the last few weeks I have fallen in love with the TeX format XeLaTeX and its XeTeX engine.
With XeLaTeX I had to overcome some hurdles, which I would like to share here:
attaching files, trimming and clipping images, learning how to use the tikzDevice package.