[Rd] Writing my first CRAN vignette

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 18 May 2014 at 11:34, Hadley Wickham wrote:
| > I am intending to use Sweave. I have read the Sweave documentation and
| > section 1.4 of the extensions manual and apart from (a) do not use split =
| > TRUE (b) and include all the source components, there does not seem to be
| > anything CRAN specific.
| 
| I'd strongly recommend using knitr instead - the biggest advantage is
| that you can use markdown, which is substantially easier to use than
| latex (and doesn't require such a massive toolchain)

Markdown is very useful. And it keeps getting better -- shiny-within-markdow
is / will rock very, very hard.

But there are also some things that I still much prefer to be in pdf form,
rather than (in however well-styled) html and browser content.  And some
paths in the toolchain that leads content from markdown to pdf are via latex,
so you end up using latex anyway. Which isn't really that hard to install on
any of the three main platforms as texlive bundles it pretty well.

And more generally, a vignette is (at least to me, but also some others)
still a 'paper' -- something that strives to be something like an academic
article (and occassionally even manages to get there).  

And for that form of written communication, I fear you will have to pry latex
from my cold dead hands.  

Dirk

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