[ESS] Integration of pandoc using polymode+knitr

[Yihui Xie]

Right -- rmarkdown is not a CRAN package _yet_, but no, it is not tied
to the RStudio company in the sense of a software package. As you can
see, it is open source (GPL-3): https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown I
do not think there is anything wrong for a company to write open
source software packages just because it is a company instead of a
university or a non-profit organization. There are great open source
products from both *.com and *.org parties. I'm not sure why you are
so concerned about the "label", or what your concerns really are, and
we (==RStudio) will truly appreciate it if you tell us what we did
wrong. Open source should not stop people from being rich, should it?
(although I'm not rich...)

The rmarkdown and related products are still under development.
Eventually rmarkdown will be a CRAN package. I see your point about
the non-R portion of source code (it is big... or is 8.5Mb really
big?), but I guess that misses the goal. The goal is not to write more
R (and only R) code in a package, but to have better-looking output
with less effort in the low-level tuning of Pandoc parameters. There
are plenty of R packages on CRAN that do not primarily contain R code,
right? (e.g. packages for datasets, packages using C++, and why should
packages containing more JavaScript code be second-class citizens? :)

BTW, I'm happy to continue the discussion in private if this is
considered off-topic.

Regards,
Yihui
--
Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
Web: http://yihui.name


On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 12:54 PM, Martin Maechler
<maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
>>>>>> Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
>>>>>>     on Thu, 27 Mar 2014 01:03:15 -0500 writes:
>
>     > Hi Mathieu,
>     > Sorry for the late reply. The rmarkdown package has made a lot of
>     > efforts in generating attractive output by default, including HTML and
>     > PDF output, etc. For example, HTML output uses Bootstrap 3 and you can
>     > easily switch themes.
>
> Well, rmarkdown is not a CRAN package... and it seems is really
> tied to the Rstudio company.
> It looks to me one way to have people flock to using RStudio everywhere..
>
>     > I know it may be a very bad idea to suggest the RStudio IDE in the ESS
>     > mailing list,
>
> yes...  ;-)
>
>     > but I still recommend you to try it out. It is super
>     > easy to go from an R Markdown document to other output formats. You do
>     > not have to remember the Pandoc arguments -- there is a configuration
>     > wizard and a little document setting button. Well, I know GUI's
>     > probably do not make sense here...
>
>     > Regards,
>     > Yihui
>     > --
>     > Yihui Xie <xieyihui at gmail.com>
>     > Web: http://yihui.name
>
>
>     > On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 9:19 PM, Mathieu Basille
>     > <basille.web at ase-research.org> wrote:
>     >> Dear Yihui,
>     >>
>     >> Le 03/11/2014 10:04 PM, Yihui Xie a écrit :
>     >>
>     >>> I'm glad that your problem was solved. Just as Ahmadou
>     >>> mentioned, we
>     >>> are heading towards rmarkdown (http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com),
> 'we' ==?== Rstudio employees, or ??
> I'm really getting a bit concerned here.
> I liked Rstudio when it was *.org, and have been getting
> increasingly nervous, now that it has been *.com ...
>
> As mentioned above, why should we suddenly have to work with a non-CRAN package?
> Also, is 'rmarkdown' (as a standard) something to be defined outside of the
> Rstudio web site any time soon?
> I've started using *.Rmd (and Rstudio to some extent) in
> teaching, but I'm really having concerns more and more.
>
>     >>>  which is a nice alternative to knitr::pandoc().
>
> Then, knitr is a CRAN package with GPL licence,
> so we can rely that it will continue to be available into the future.
> (Ok, I see that rmarkdown also has a GPL licence.. and it is on
>  github, just not on CRAN, and it contains 8.5 MB of source code,
>  most of which is java script ... ... )
>
>     >> would be fairly easy to use any other function, such as rmarkdown::render
>     >> instead of knitr::pandoc. As for me, as I already use knitr (obviously) to
>     >> knit, and pandoc is also installed on my system, it makes more sense to use
>     >> what's available!
>
> and what is simple and modular..  The rmarkdown with all its new
> bells and whistle and huge amounts of non-R source code, has its
> advantages but also its drawbacks in my view.
>
> Martin
>
>     >> Or maybe I'm missing the obvious: is there a strong
>     >> argument in favor of rmarkdown::render instead of knitr::pandoc?
>     >>
>     >> Mathieu.
>