I've been struggling for a week now trying to figure out how to generate reports in R using either Sweave or Brew. I should say right at the beginning that I have never used Tex before but I understand the logic of it.

I have read this document several times. However, I cannot even get a simple example to parse. Brew successfully converts a simple markup file (just a title and some text) to a .tex file (no error). But it never ever converts tex to a pdf.

> library(tools)
> library(brew)
> brew("population.brew", "population.tex")
> texi2dvi("population.tex", pdf = TRUE)

The last step always fails with:

  Error in texi2dvi("population.tex", pdf = TRUE) : 
  Running 'texi2dvi' on 'population.tex' failed.

What am I doing wrong?

The report I am trying to build is fairly simple. I have 157 different analysis to summarize. Each one has 4 plots, 1 table and a summary. I just want

output plot 1,2,3,4
output table
\pagebreak
...

that's it. Can anyone help me get further? I use osx, don't have Tex installed.

thanks