[R-pkg-devel] Best practices for vignettes

[Lenth, Russell V]

Thanks, Dirk. Well, I tried this (after suitable modification), and what it does is create all the intermediate files, graphics files, an .Rout file, etc. in the vignette directory. And even then, for some reason it didn't build the pdfs correctly. So I had a mess to clean up.

I've tried Markdown a few times, and technically, I guess it works. But I always find myself abandoning it later because it gives me what it wants instead of what I want. I suppose I could learn more of its refinements, but even then it doesn't seem very promising. I'm not too old to learn new things, but at my age, I think I am empowered to choose what I want to learn -- and expertise on Markdown is just not a big priority.

Russ

-----Original Message-----
From: Dirk Eddelbuettel [mailto:edd at debian.org] 
Sent: Sunday, July 26, 2015 2:31 PM
To: Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org>
Cc: Lenth, Russell V <russell-lenth at uiowa.edu>; r-package-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R-pkg-devel] Best practices for vignettes


On 26 July 2015 at 14:22, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| 
| On 26 July 2015 at 18:42, Lenth, Russell V wrote:
| | What's the best way to manage vignettes?
| 
| All the young ones will of course tell you to use Markdown :)
| 
| I still use Sweave / LaTeX as well, along with a custom driver: 
| highlight, as we once figured out how to make it create pretty shaded 
| boxen with code (as seen in the various Rcpp vignettes).
| 
| So for that I often keep a five-line script 'buildVignette.r' in the 
| vignette directory.  With DESCRIPTION set up right (for the added 
| vignette driver) this then works in the package when it works manually for the tests.

I was rambling here.  What I meant to say is

 - buildVignette.r as shown below allows me to build the vignette on the spot
   outside of package builds -- ie when I am in "vignette writing mode"

 - if the vignette builds during the manual builds, which by their design
   mock what the package build process does, then I am reasonably confident
   that the R CMD ... process works too.

Hope this clarifies.

Dirk