[Rd] texi2dvi and buildVignettes() on Windows

[Achim Zeileis]

I am currently writing a (private) package in which I produce pdf 
files from within R using LaTeX. To do so I mainly copied some lines 
from the buildVignettes() function in the tools package. This uses the 
texi2dvi which is included in R's bin directory:

  system(paste(file.path(R.home(), "bin", "texi2dvi"),
               "--quiet --pdf", bft))

This runs fine on Linux and I assumed that as it is included in 
buildVignettes() it should also work on Windows (which is important 
for me because I want to share the package with a couple of colleagues 
working on Windows). But apparently, texi2dvi is not provided in the 
Windows distribution of R.

I already asked Duncan privately about this who kindly tried to run 
buildVignettes() on the vignette in my lmtest package. He got the 
results:

<quote>
I get the following:

> buildVignettes('lmtest')
Warning message: 
F:\R\rw1080/bin/texi2dvi not found 

The help for buildVignettes says it's an internal command; perhaps the
thing that calls it has some workaround for Windows.  I only see it
being called from src/scripts/build.in, which runs under Windows, but
I can't see any attempt to work around this limitation, so maybe it's
just not working.  
</quote>

So maybe I am missing something here (which is rather likely as I'm 
not used to Windows at all...) but is it possible that 
buildVignettes() does not work on Windows? If it has some workaround I 
would be glad to learn how that works. Other suggestions on how to 
compile LaTeX from within R in some (more or less) cross-platform way 
are of course also very welcome.

thanks in advance,
Z