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

[Georgi Boshnakov]

From: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com>
To: Mark van der Loo <mark.vanderloo using gmail.com>
Cc: Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd using debian.org>, r-devel
	<r-devel using r-project.org>


Further to Duncan's comments:

> It would be nice if the documents in inst/doc were linked to on the CRAN 
> landing page of a package. I think that documents under inst/doc are a 
> bit hard to find if package authors do not create (possibly many) links 
> to them in Rd files or vignettes.

There is the seemingly underused option "package" of help():

help(package = "pkgname", help_type = "html")

The vignettes and other documents (including sources of vignettes, etc) are at the top of the html page (help_type is used in case the default for help is text format, when the output is less convenient in this case). 

What is shown can be customised by a custom index.tml under inst/doc (described in WRE).  An inconvenience for users of devtools::check()  is that it wipes out inst/doc (but it does ask for confirmation).


Georgi Boshnakov



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Message: 12
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2020 05:22:02 -0500
From: Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com>
To: Mark van der Loo <mark.vanderloo using gmail.com>
Cc: Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd using debian.org>, r-devel
	<r-devel using r-project.org>
Subject: Re: [Rd] vignettes present in 2 folders or won't work
Message-ID: <92e51613-b647-5d72-793a-dd64e0edac3c using gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"

On 02/11/2020 4:07 a.m., Mark van der Loo wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sun, Nov 1, 2020 at 10:39 PM Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com 
> <mailto:murdoch.duncan using gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     On 01/11/2020 2:57 p.m., Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>      >
>      > The closest to a canonical reference for a static vignette is the
>     basic blog
>      > post by Mark at
>      >
>      >
>     https://www.markvanderloo.eu/yaRb/2019/01/11/add-a-static-pdf-vignette-to-an-r-package/
>      >
>      > which I follow in a number of packages.
>      >
>      > Back to the original point by Alexandre: No, I do _not_ think we
>     can do
>      > without a double copy of the _pre-made_ pdf ("input") and the
>     _resulting_ pdf
>      > ("output").
>      >
>      > That bugs me a little too but I take it as a given as static /
>     pre-made
>      > vignettes are non-standard (given lack of any mention in WRE, and
>     the pretty
>      > obvious violation of the "spirit of the law" of vignette which is
>     after all
>      > made to run code, not to avoid it). Yet uses for static vignettes
>     are pretty
>      > valid and here we are with another clear as mud situation.
>      >
> 
>     In many cases such files aren't vignettes.
> 
>     By definition, packages should contain plain text source code for
>     vignettes.  They can contain other PDF files in inst/doc, but if you
>     don't include the plain text source, those aren't vignettes.
> 
>     An exception would be a package that contains the source code but
>     doesn't want to require CRAN or other users to run it, because it's too
>     time-consuming, or needs obscure resources.  The CRAN policy
>     discusses this.
> 
>     Duncan Murdoch
> 
> 
> It would be nice if the documents in inst/doc were linked to on the CRAN 
> landing page of a package. I think that documents under inst/doc are a 
> bit hard to find if package authors do not create (possibly many) links 
> to them in Rd files or vignettes.

What I'd suggest is that you write a "browseDocs" function that displays 
them in some nice format (similar to "browseVignettes").  Maybe CRAN 
would choose to add a new category listing its results, but at a 
minimum, you could very easily add a vignette called "Other documents" 
that contains a list of links.   It wouldn't be as prominent as 
"Vignettes" on CRAN, but you could make the display as prominent as you 
want on your own web page.

Duncan Murdoch




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