[Rd] Windows vignettes, shQuote, texi2dvi

[Uwe Ligges]

Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

> I noticed a shQuote fix for Windows in the svn logs.
> Just wanted to point out that this will favorably 
> affect texi2dvi on Windows which previously used
> UNIX quoting and so generated an incorrect Windows
> command.  (Note that texi2dvi is used when creating
> vignettes.)
> 
> Another problem is that the recommended tex
> distribution for Windows, fptex, does not have texi2dvi
> in the first place. The alternative, MiKTeX, is harder
> to install

I heared some people think so, but apparently it is not a big problem.


 > than fptex but instructions are available
> and it does have an equivalent to texi2dvi called texify.exe;
> however, R still does not know about texify.exe 
> resulting in additional installation hassles,
> viz. setting the texi2dvi option or setting up a texi2dvi.bat
> file yourself that calls texify.exe or just forgetting
> about texi2dvi and manually running the necessary tex commands
> when creating vignettes on Windows.

texi2dvi is also available in MikTeX, see package miktex-texinfo-bin.

See also ?texi2dvi in R to see how you can set something different, e.g. 
"texify", which is explicitly given in the examples.



> There are also additional problems related to using the
> perl package-building scripts in Windows.   I can create the
> zoo vignette using:
> 
> setwd("...whatever...")
> Sweave("zoo.Rnw")
> texi2dvi("zoo.tex")
> 
> provided I modify the source to texi2dvi to use the
> appropriate quoting but even with that modification,
> the perl package build scripts only build
> the vignette as far as the zoo.tex file and I must
> do the rest by hand so there is some problem with
> the scripts or in how they interact with R.

Are you going to provide a patch?

Uwe Ligges


> I think the real ultimate solution is to replace the
> perl scripts with R code to make them more maintainable.
> This seems like the direction things are moving anyways
> and I suspect that they were developed long before R
> got to its current advanced state where R is just
> as powerful as perl.
> 
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