yihui/knitr — Issue #127: Use Google Docs for collaboration?
Author: yihui
Created: 2012-02-08 03:32:09+00:00
State: open
Labels: Feature

One possibility:

```r
library(RGoogleDocs)
options(RCurlOptions = list(ssl.verifypeer = FALSE))

con = getGoogleDocsConnection(getGoogleAuth("foo@gmail.com", readline()))
d = readDoc('knitr-input-doc', con) # an HTML file

library(XML)
htmlParse(as(d, 'character'))
## look for chunk patterns, run code, use hooks to wrap results, upload to Google...
```

The advantage is not only for collaboration, but also the possibility for people living in the world of MS Word to consider reproducible research (trivial for LaTeX people, but messy for Word)...

Challenges:

1. `RGoogleDocs` seems to be outdated, or at least not actively maintained
2. R code can be hidden in messy texts; it is not readily applicable to knitr's parsing engine, so needs to be cleaned beforehand (this should not be too hard)
3. How to deal with images? I do not know at the moment.

Is this a possible candidate project for Google Summer of Code?