[Rd] vignettes present in 2 folders or won't work

[Alexandre Courtiol]

Dear all,

I am struggling with an issue related to static vignettes: they work, but
only when present in double in the tarball -- in the folder inst/doc and
vignettes; see below for details.

Details:

I am pre-compiling heavy vignettes thanks to the vignette builder R.rsp.
So basically, I have PDF files which I want the package to use as Vignettes.

For this, I have the following in my Description file:
VignetteBuilder: R.rsp

I am organising the vignette by hand using a Makefile (because this is the
only way that has proven 100% reliable to me, across a variety of
situations).

In my Makefile, I have something like:

build: clean
  mkdir -p inst/doc
  mkdir vignettes
  -cp sources_vignettes/*/*.pdf* vignettes
  Rscript -e "tools::compactPDF(paths = 'vignettes', gs_quality =
'printer')"
  cp vignettes/*.pdf* inst/doc
  Rscript -e "devtools::document()"
  mkdir inst/extdata/sources_vignettes
  cp sources_vignettes/*/*.Rnw inst/extdata/sources_vignettes
  Rscript -e "devtools::build(vignettes = FALSE)"

That works fine, the vignettes show up using browseVignettes() after
installing the package the normal way.

However, after building, the tar.gz contains each pdf corresponding to a
vignette twice: once in vignettes and once in inst/doc (which is obvious,
when reading the Makefile).

>From the reading of "Writing R Extensions" and other material, I cannot
tell if that is a must or not, but I hope it is not since I wish to avoid
that (my pdfs are large even once compressed).

My problem is that when I delete either inst/doc or vignette just before
calling the last command of the Makefile (Rscript -e
"devtools::build(vignettes = FALSE)"), then browseVignettes() does not find
the vignettes after a normal installation.

If anyone knows of some _complete_ documentation about the ever troublesome
topic of vignettes building in R, I would be very grateful too...

Many thanks!

Alex

-- 
Alexandre Courtiol

http://sites.google.com/site/alexandrecourtiol/home

*"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts"*, R. Feynman

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