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

[Michael Hannon]

Thanks, Duncan.  The files in question are Emacs Org-mode files, and I
think these are more or less isomorphic to Rmd files, but I haven't
used Org-mode in a long time, so I think the mapping (Org-mode ==>
Rmd) would be painful.

-- Mike


On Mon, Feb 19, 2018 at 1:20 AM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18/02/2018 9:06 PM, Michael Hannon 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.)
>
>
> You don't say what format the source is, but if it is LaTeX, you just need
> to add some comments at the beginning, rename ending in .Rnw, and R will
> recognize plain LaTeX files as Sweave vignettes.
>
> See the Writing R Extensions manual, section 1.4.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
>>
>> Suggestions welcome.  Thanks.
>>
>> -- Mike
>>
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>