[Rd] MiKTeX's withdrawal of texi2dvi.exe

[Prof Brian Ripley]

MiKTeX has abruptly removed texi2dvi.exe from its distribution.  (MiKTeX 
broke its updating process earlier and an attempted update trashed the 
updater on my installation so I was forced to make a fresh install of 
the current distribution.  I do not know if updates remove a currently 
installed texi2dvi.exe.)

This has two consequences:

1) It is used by tools::texi2dvi() if found.  As far as I can tell 
texify.exe is a sufficient replacement there, so you can set 
options(texi2dvi = "texify") (and R-patched/R-devel have been changed to 
try that).  Otherwise emulation will be used and does work, less robustly.

2) It was used to make manuals when building R from sources.  This has 
been worked around in R-patched/R-devel.  If you need to build an 
earlier version of R, edit doc/manuals/Makefile.win from

ifeq "$(MIKTEX)" "TRUE"
R_TEXOPTS = --include-directory=../../share/texmf/tex/latex
TEXI2DVI = texi2dvi
else
R_TEXOPTS =
TEXI2DVI =
endif

setting the first TEXI2DVI line to

TEXI2DVI = TEXINDEX=/Rtools/bin/texindex.exe texify

altering the full path to texindex.exe as required (being on the PATH is 
not sufficient).  (For current versions, set this in MkRules.local.)


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford
1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK