[Rd] Google Season of Docs 2022

[Heather Turner]

Dear All,

Further to this, we have had some discussion regarding supporting greater use of HTML vignettes (https://github.com/rstats-gsod/gsod2022/issues/5). The initial motivation was accessibility (PDF vignettes are not so accessible to users of screen readers or other accessibility tools e.g. browser apps that change the font or switch to dark mode). However, many users prefer HTML as it is easier to browse online and integrates with IDEs like RStudio. Search engines can work with them more effectively, helping people to find relevant packages. About a third of packages on CRAN use HTML vignettes (have "knitr" or "rmarkdown" in the VignetteBuilder field).

As discussed on this issue, some work can be done at the grass-roots level, to encourage wider use of HTML vignettes. However, it would help to have a core tool for creating HTML vignettes. An issue with rmarkdown is the number of dependencies (apparently 18 non-core or recommended packages). However, Yihui Xie is highly interested in  developing a much leaner package depending only on commonmark and is willing to put this on his agenda if people are really interested in it, especially if R core can consider making it a recommended package.

I realize that R core are keen to reduce rather than increase the number of recommended packages. But this does seem to be a desirable core functionality. Might R core consider integrating such a package in future?

Best wishes,
Heather

On Fri, Feb 4, 2022, at 8:02 PM, Heather Turner wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> Yesterday Google announced Season of Docs 2022: 
> https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/02/Announcing%20Season%20of%20Docs%202022.html.
>
> You may know that the R project participated for the first time last 
> year with a project related to useR! and there is interest in us 
> offering a project again this year.
>
> Organization applications open at the end of February, so now is the 
> time for us to explore ideas for projects and line up potential 
> mentors. 
>
> Organization of GSoD is done on GitHub: 
> https://github.com/rstats-gsod/gsod2022 and I have added a number of 
> issues with ideas drawn from discussions on the R Contribution Working 
> Group, R-Devel Slack, Forwards taskforce, and R Consortium Repositories 
> Working Group. Feel free to comment on these issues or add your own 
> suggestions.
>
> For more general discussion of GSoD, you can reply here, on the R-Devel 
> Slack or at the next R Contribution Working Group (see the R 
> Contribution Site for details of the Slack/working group: 
> https://contributor.r-project.org/).
>
> Best wishes,
> Heather
>
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