MiKTeX has abruptly removed texi2dvi.exe from its distribution. (MiKTeX broke its updating process earlier and an attempted update trashed the updater on my installation so I was forced to make a fresh install of the current distribution. I do not know if updates remove a currently installed texi2dvi.exe.) This has two consequences: 1) It is used by tools::texi2dvi() if found. As far as I can tell texify.exe is a sufficient replacement there, so you can set options(texi2dvi = "texify") (and R-patched/R-devel have been changed to try that). Otherwise emulation will be used and does work, less robustly. 2) It was used to make manuals when building R from sources. This has been worked around in R-patched/R-devel. If you need to build an earlier version of R, edit doc/manuals/Makefile.win from ifeq "$(MIKTEX)" "TRUE" R_TEXOPTS = --include-directory=../../share/texmf/tex/latex TEXI2DVI = texi2dvi else R_TEXOPTS = TEXI2DVI = endif setting the first TEXI2DVI line to TEXI2DVI = TEXINDEX=/Rtools/bin/texindex.exe texify altering the full path to texindex.exe as required (being on the PATH is not sufficient). (For current versions, set this in MkRules.local.)
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, University of Oxford 1 South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3TG, UK