[Rd] Changing style for the Sweave vignettes

[Yihui Xie]

As someone who was also annoyed by command line prompts a couple of
years ago, I wrote knitr and removed prompts as well as the
continuation characters (+) by default (FAQ5:
https://github.com/yihui/knitr/blob/master/FAQ.md).

BTW, I do not always trust copying text from PDF. Perhaps it is fine
for code/text in verbatim environments (as Paul indicated above).
LaTeX users are probably aware of ligatures (e.g. for "ff") and the
fact that leading/trailing white spaces are often removed in the PDF
output, which will make "What You Copy is Not What You Get".
Personally I think HTML is more reliable in this respect (<pre></pre>
is more faithful), and this is one of the reasons that I'm in favor of
HTML vignettes instead of PDF when I do not care that much about
precise typesetting (which is not always the most important thing).

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


On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 10:10 AM, January Weiner
<january.weiner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Paul and Martin,
>
> thanks for the useful tips. I'll start with Paul's suggestion (getting
> rid of these '+'-es will already be a boon!), and move from my old
> Sweave vignettes when possible.
>
> Thank you!
> j.
>
> On 13 November 2014 15:35, Paul Gilbert <pgilbert902 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> You might also consider starting your vignettes with
>>
>> \begin{Scode}{echo=FALSE,results=hide}
>>  options(continue="  ")
>> \end{Scode}
>>
>> Then you get one prompt but it is still easy to cut and paste. This has been
>> in many of my packages for many years, so I think it would be fair to assume
>> it is acceptable.
>>
>> Paul
>>
>>
>> On 11/13/2014 06:56 AM, January Weiner wrote:
>>>
>>> Thank you, Søren and Brian for your answers.
>>>
>>> Whether this is the right list -- well, I think it is, since I am
>>> developing a package and would like to create a vignette which is
>>> useful and convenient for my users. I know how to extract the vignette
>>> code. However, most of my users don't.  Or if they do, they do not
>>> bother, but copy the examples from the PDF while they are reading it.
>>> At least that is my observation.
>>>
>>> I'm sorry that my e-mail was unclear -- I started my e-mail with "as a
>>> user, ...", but I did mention that it is my vignettes that I am
>>> concerned with.
>>>
>>> options(prompt=...) is an idea, though I'm still not sure as to the
>>> second part of my question - whether a vignette without a command
>>> prompt is acceptable in a package or not.
>>>
>>> Kind regards,
>>>
>>> j.
>>>
>>>
>>> On 13 November 2014 12:36, Brian G. Peterson <brian at braverock.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On 11/13/2014 05:09 AM, January Weiner wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> As a user, I am always annoyed beyond measure that Sweave vignettes
>>>>> precede the code by a command line prompt. It makes running examples
>>>>> by simple copying of the commands from the vignette to the console a
>>>>> pain. I know the idea is that it is clear what is the command, and
>>>>> what is the output, but I'd rather precede the output with some kind
>>>>> of marking.
>>>>>
>>>>> Is there any other solution possible / allowed in vignettes? I would
>>>>> much prefer to make my vignettes easier to use for people like me.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I agree with Søren that this is not the right list, but to complete the
>>>> thread...
>>>>
>>>> See the examples in
>>>>
>>>> ?vignette
>>>>
>>>> start just above
>>>>
>>>> ## Now let us have a closer look at the code
>>>>
>>>> All vignette's are compiled.  You can trivially extract all the code used
>>>> for any vignette in R, including any code not displayed in the text and
>>>> hidden from the user, from within R, or saved out to an editor so you can
>>>> source it line by line from Rstudio (or vim or emacs or...). That's the
>>>> whole point.
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>>
>>>> Brian
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Brian G. Peterson
>>>> http://braverock.com/brian/
>>>> Ph: 773-459-4973
>>>> IM: bgpbraverock