[Rd] texi2dvi and buildVignettes() on Windows

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Last time I tried texi2dvi did not work under the shell used under 
Windows.

On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, Achim Zeileis wrote:

> I am currently writing a (private) package in which I produce pdf 
> files from within R using LaTeX. To do so I mainly copied some lines 
> from the buildVignettes() function in the tools package. This uses the 
> texi2dvi which is included in R's bin directory:
> 
>   system(paste(file.path(R.home(), "bin", "texi2dvi"),
>                "--quiet --pdf", bft))
> 
> This runs fine on Linux and I assumed that as it is included in 
> buildVignettes() it should also work on Windows (which is important 
> for me because I want to share the package with a couple of colleagues 
> working on Windows). But apparently, texi2dvi is not provided in the 
> Windows distribution of R.
> 
> I already asked Duncan privately about this who kindly tried to run 
> buildVignettes() on the vignette in my lmtest package. He got the 
> results:
> 
> <quote>
> I get the following:
> 
> > buildVignettes('lmtest')
> Warning message: 
> F:\R\rw1080/bin/texi2dvi not found 
> 
> The help for buildVignettes says it's an internal command; perhaps the
> thing that calls it has some workaround for Windows.  I only see it
> being called from src/scripts/build.in, which runs under Windows, but
> I can't see any attempt to work around this limitation, so maybe it's
> just not working.  
> </quote>
> 
> So maybe I am missing something here (which is rather likely as I'm 
> not used to Windows at all...) but is it possible that 
> buildVignettes() does not work on Windows? If it has some workaround I 
> would be glad to learn how that works. Other suggestions on how to 
> compile LaTeX from within R in some (more or less) cross-platform way 
> are of course also very welcome.
> 
> thanks in advance,
> Z
> 
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> 
> 

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595