One of the first things that I found problematic about paper writing was the manual processing and updating of numbers based on experiments. Ever since my master thesis, this felt like a unnecessary and error prone step.

Since a couple of years, I am using R to do the necessary statistics and data processing on for instance benchmark results. R provides very convenient libraries to produce high quality and beautiful plots.

Over the years, my setup evolved to automate more and more things based on a Latex/ReBench/KnitR tool chain. Now, I finally put together a stripped down template project that combines some of the scripts and documents the setup. The result takes a ReBench data file and generates a PDF that looks like this:

The code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/smarr/perf-latex-paper