[R] Include pre-existing PDF files as vignettes in an R package?

[Ista Zahn]

Hi Mike,

Did you read the relevant section of the official "Writing R
Extensions" manual? If so, what about the instructions provided there
do you find lacking?

Best,
Ista

On Sun, Feb 18, 2018 at 9:06 PM, Michael Hannon
<jmhannon.ucdavis at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings.  The group that I work with has just started using the approach
> outlined in Karl Broman's handy primer:
>
>     http://kbroman.org/pkg_primer/pages/vignettes.html
>
> to create vignettes for a couple of R packages.
>
> This works fine as long as we have a current Rmd version of the vignette.  But
> we have some old PDF documents that we'd like to include as vignettes as well.
> I'd like to know if there's a way to include such PDF files as vignettes.
>
> We *do* have the source files for the PDF files in question, but it would be
> tedious to convert those source files to Rmd format.
>
> My first thought was simply to add the PDF files to the .../vignettes
> subdirectory and run the devtools::build_vignettes() function (mentioned in
> the Broman tutorial), but that doesn't work.  I.e., the PDF files don't appear
> in the list of vignettes for the package.
>
> And after running devtools::build_vignettes I see that there's a lot of
> additional stuff in:
>
>     ...lib/R/site-library/<package_name>/...
>
> so I don't see any obvious way to "fool" R into using the PDF files that
> haven't gone through the whole knitr/rmarkdown process.  (Not to mention that
> such an approach would be fragile at best.)
>
> Suggestions welcome.  Thanks.
>
> -- Mike
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.