[R-pkg-devel] Best practices for vignettes

[Lenth, Russell V]

Thanks. This helped me learn a few things...

1. buildVignettes() operates on an installed package. So in RStudio, I do "build and reload" and it copies the vignette sources to the right place. Unfortunately, it does not also copy the associated .bib file, and it erases the one already there. So I have to manually copy it each time. However, I could script this and thus be able to get a reliable test of the vignettes.

2. I now know why I didn't get a build error. For testing, I put my LaTeX error back in the vignette... 
  -- On Windows with MikTeX, buildVignettes() reports only a warning that the pdflatex process returned an exit code of 1. 
  -- On the Mac with TeX Live, I get an error, not just a warning.
I suspect that TeX Live returns a higher error code for the same error. 

Most important, it appears that developers who use Windows with MikTeX should be advised that they will NOT detect certain LaTeX errors in routine building and checking. It might be worth switching to a different Windows installation of TeX.

Russ
--
Russell V. Lenth  -  Professor Emeritus
Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science
The University of Iowa  -  Iowa City, IA 52242  USA
Dept office (319)335-0712  -  FAX (319)335-3017
russell-lenth at uiowa.edu  -  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu/~rlenth/

________________________________________
From: Henrik Bengtsson [henrik.bengtsson at ucsf.edu]
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2015 5:50 AM
To: Lenth, Russell V
Cc: Dirk Eddelbuettel; r-package-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R-pkg-devel] Best practices for vignettes

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.

/Henrik