[Rd] NEWS.md support on CRAN

[Gábor Csárdi]

On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
wrote:
[...]

> I think the harder problem is display.  CRAN can run pandoc, but can
> users who install the package from source?  I would expect some obscure
> platforms (like Windows ;-) would not have it available.
>
[...]

I don't think pandoc is the best way to go with NEWS.md (and README.md,
actually). I would be surprised if many package maintainer built their
NEWS/README files with pandoc. They just look at them at GitHub (or another
similar service).

GitHub has API for building HTML from MarkDown:
https://developer.github.com/v3/markdown/
It can build GitHub-flavored MarkDown, in which case you get links to
GitHub issues, etc. or just plain MarkDown, like a GitHub README.

If you don't want to rely on their service, then there are a multitude of
lightweight MarkDown parsers available, e.g.
https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it is a good one IMO.

Pandoc is great for vignettes, but you don't need its full power for
READMEs and especially not for NEWS files. In fact most NEWS.md files look
good as text.

Gabor

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