[R-pkg-devel] Vignettes from LaTeX files.

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 5 March 2021 at 15:41, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
| On 05/03/2021 2:40 p.m., Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
| > Thank you. Glad to hear it's useful.
| > 
| > This plain TeX/LaTeX vignette engine is implemented using base R.  If
| > someone is willing to drive the efforts, I think it's not too much
| > work to refactor it and propose it for base R itself, where I think it
| > belongs,
| 
| What is your reasoning for this?  As a former R Core member, I would say 
| the reasons for something to be added to base R are:
| 
|   - it's generally useful
|   - it doesn't have a lot of dependencies
|   - it doesn't work as well in a contributed package
| 
| The first two conditions seem to be met, but what's wrong with leaving 
| it in R.rsp? Would something in base R be simplified by having this there?

It feels like this is about the third time in a decade+ I have seen you two
discuss the same issue.  Henrik advocates a fine technical solution from his
r.rsp package, you point out that there is benefit to keeping base R smaller,
and solutions in add-on packages.

All the while we all carry on and just slap the four or five lines onto the
file make it an Sweave vignette _without any executed code_ which works in
base R today as a proxy for pure LaTeX, just as it has for 25 or so years.

Or do as some of us do and follow Mark's trick [1] of including a pre-made
pdf inside an even more minimal Rnw file for the Sweave driver. Works great
with any pdf: pure LaTeX, LaTeX from (R)Markdown, ...

Dirk

[1] https://www.markvanderloo.eu/yaRb/2019/01/11/add-a-static-pdf-vignette-to-an-r-package/

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