[Rd] Viewing pdfs from inst/doc

[Romain Francois]

On 09/04/2009 11:58 PM, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
>
> On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 10:44 PM, rudjer<rkoenker at uiuc.edu>  wrote:
>>
>> Writing R extensions says:
>>
>> In addition to the help files in Rd format, R packages allow the inclusion
>> of documents in arbitrary other formats. The standard location for these is
>> subdirectory inst/doc of a source package, the contents will be copied to
>> subdirectory doc when the package is installed. Pointers from package help
>> indices to the installed documents are automatically created. Documents in
>> inst/doc can be in arbitrary format, however we strongly recommend to
>> provide them in PDF format, such that users on all platforms can easily read
>> them.
>>
>> My question is easily How?  The function vignette() provides a convenient
>> way to read properly Sweaved
>> vignettes, but what about plain old pdfs that someone like me would like to
>> stick into inst/doc and
>> then view?  It seems possible to make a modified vignette function to do
>> this using print.vignette,
>> but having started down this road, I got the strong sensation of reinventing
>> the wheel and the
>> inevitably related sensation that I wasn't going to know what to call my new
>> wheel when it was
>> created.  I recognize that the current setup is supposed to encourage proper
>> vignettes, but sometimes
>> courage fails.
>>
>> A related questions is whether there is a convenient substitute for a
>> package specific function like this:
>>     FAQ<- function (pkg = "quantreg")
>>           file.show(file.path(system.file(package = pkg), "FAQ"))
>>
>> to read the faq that I've written for the package and placed in the inst/
>> directory.
>
>   I think I tried to do this a little while ago, and trawling R-help
> and R-dev came up with the suggestion of putting something in a demo
> section. Hence I have foo/demo/bar.R which is:
>
> pdf = system.file("doc/bar.pdf",package="foo")
>
> if (.Platform$OS.type == "windows") {
>    shell.exec(pdf)
> }else{
>    system(paste(shQuote(getOption("pdfviewer")), shQuote(pdf)),
>              wait = FALSE)
> }
>
>   Then when a user does demo(bar) the PDF pops up. I document this in
> the Rd doc for bar.
>
>   It does seem a bit kludgy, and maybe there's a need for a package to
> handle all this...
>
> Barry

print.vignette knows that it needs to factor out the "open a pdf file" 
part, see the <FIXME> section :

 > utils:::print.vignette
function(x, ...){

     if(length(x$pdf)){
         ## <FIXME>
         ## Should really abstract this into a BioC style
         ## openPDF() along the lines of browseURL() ...
         if(.Platform$OS.type == "windows")
             shell.exec(x$pdf)
         else
             system(paste(shQuote(getOption("pdfviewer")), shQuote(x$pdf)),
                    wait = FALSE)
         ## </FIXME>
     } else {
         warning(gettextf("vignette '%s' has no PDF", x$topic),
                 call. = FALSE, domain = NA)
     }
     invisible(x)
}
<environment: namespace:utils>


You can trick the system using something like this :

fake.vignette <- function( file = system.file( "doc", vignette, package 
= package ), vignette, package, topic = vignette ){
	structure( pdf = file, topic = topic, class = "vignette" )
}

Romain

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Romain Francois
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