[R-pkg-devel] Rdmacros as Suggests rather than Imports

[Ivan Krylov]

On Sat, 23 Jan 2021 04:54:51 -0500
Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com> wrote:

> I wonder if there's a way to define stubs for the macros in the
> package, and use mathjaxr versions only conditional on having it
> available?

I had an idea along the lines of

\Sexpr[results=rd]{if (...) '\\newcommand{\\mjeqn}{...}'}

...but \Sexpr seems to be expanded too late in the Rd processing
pipeline for the \newcommand to have any effect. This also seems to
mean that it's impossible to dynamically load macro definitions
belonging to a different package from a \Sexpr:

% doesn't affect the rest of the document
\Sexpr[results=rd]{
 if (nzchar(f <- system.file('help/macros/mathjax.Rd', 'mathjaxr')))
  readLines(f)
}

An "optional mathjaxr" implementation will probably end up with its own
copy of man/macros/mathjax.Rd (but not the rest of MathJax), with \mjeqn
and friends defined to check whether mathjaxr package is available
before outputting MathJax markup or \eqn.

Loading the rest of the .Rd in the same \Sexpr where \newcommand{} is
evaluated (1) doesn't work because only one Rd section per \Sexpr is
supported and (2) would be a truly horrible hack if it worked.

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan