[R-pkg-devel] Suppressing long-running vignette code in CRAN submission

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On Tue, Oct 17, 2023 at 12:45?PM John Fox <jfox at mcmaster.ca> wrote:

Hello Dirk,

Thank you for the additional information.

As you suggest, what you did to distribute pre-built PDF vignettes is
quite similar to what R.rsp does, except that the latter also supports
pre-built HTML vignettes, which is what I'd prefer to distribute. Since

Author of R.rsp here: It supports both static PDFs and static HTMLs, cf.

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/R.rsp/vignettes/R_packages-Static_PDF_and_HTML_vignettes.pdf

/Henrik

I apparently have that working now, we'll probably go with it unless we
hit snags when the package is sent to CRAN.

While I appreciate the offer, it's probably not necessary for you to
spend more time on this now.

Thanks again,
   John

On 2023-10-17 3:19 p.m., Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:

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John,

On 17 October 2023 at 10:02, John Fox wrote:
| Hello Dirk,
|
| Thank you (and Kevin and John) for addressing my questions.
|
| No one directly answered my first question, however, which was whether
| the approach that I suggested would work. I guess that the implication
| is that it won't, but it would be nice to confirm that before I try
| something else, specifically using R.rsp.

I am a little remote here, both mentally and physically. What I might do here
in the case of your long-running vignette, and have done in about half a
dozen packages where I wanted 'certainty' and no surprises, is to render the
pdf vignette I want as I want them locally, ship them in the package as an
included file (sometimes from a subdirectory) and have a five-or-so line
Sweave .Rnw file include it. That works without hassles. Here is the Rnw I
use for package anytime

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
%\VignetteIndexEntry{Introduction to anytime}
%\VignetteKeywords{anytime, date, datetime, conversion}
%\VignettePackage{anytime}
%\VignetteEncoding{UTF-8}

\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages=-, fitpaper=true]{anytime-intro.pdf}
\end{document}
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

That is five lines of LaTeX code slurping in the pdf (per the blog post by
Mark). As I understand it R.rsp does something similar at the marginal cost
of an added dependency.

Now, as mentioned, you can also 'conditionally' conpute in a vignette and
choose if and when to use a data cache. I think that we show most of that in
the package described in the RJournal piece by Brooke and myself on drat for
data repositories. (We may be skipping the compute when the data is not
accessible. Loading a precomputed set is similar. I may be doing that in the
much older never quite finished gcbd package and its vignette.

Hope this helps, maybe more once I am back home.

Cheers, Dirk

| Best,
|   John
|
| On 2023-10-17 4:02 a.m., Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| > Caution: External email.
| >
| >
| > On 16 October 2023 at 10:42, Kevin R Coombes wrote:
| > | Produce a PDF file yourself, then use the "as.is" feature of the R.rsp
| > | package.
| >
| > For completeness, that approach also works directly with Sweave. Described in
| > a blog post by Mark van der Loo in 2019, and used in a number of packages
| > including a few of mine.
| >
| > That said, I also used the approach described by John Harrold and cached
| > results myself.
| >
| > Dirk
| >
| > --
| > dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org
| >
| > ______________________________________________
| > R-package-devel at r-project.org mailing list
| > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
|

--
dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org