[R-pkg-devel] Best practices for vignettes

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 27 July 2015 at 12:50, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
| Have a look at tools::buildVignette() - it builds a vignette the same
| way as R CMD build does it.  It's a good start for troubleshooting.

Seconded.
 
| /Henrik
| 
| On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 1:31 AM, Lenth, Russell V
| <russell-lenth at uiowa.edu> wrote:
| > 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.

If you have the patience, you probably want to debug this piece by piece, and
maybe making the vignette (temporarily) smaller and smaller and less
dependent on other things.

Sometimes it is the little things. I once had 'build/' in .Rbuildignore
because I thought it was spurious. Not so. Tooks more than one iteration,
countless feeble attempts and an eventual hint from a CRAN maintainer.

Another debugging strategy is to grab a (small enough) existing package by
someone else and see _exactly_ how it is setup.

Lastly, "if you can't beat'em" ...  I do have some Markdown vignettes in a
newer package (drat) and that works well.  Doesn't look as perfect as a pdf,
but html rendering has its charms and uses.

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org