R devel - Aug 2016 - feature request for non-sweave vignettes

Currently Makefiles for vignettes are only supported for .tex files.  Could
the tools package be modified to allow file extensions to be specified for
a vignette engine?  Having the pandoc pdf conversion in a Makefile rather
than through R would be tidier in some cases.

If I specify my vignette engine as

```
tools::vignetteEngine(
  'myengine',
  pattern = '\\.[Rr](md|nw)$',
  output = c('md', 'tex'),
  ...
)
```

the `tools:::find_vignette_product` function could have

`if (final) c("pdf", "html") else unique(c("pdf",
"html", "tex",
engine$output))`

that's probably the only line that would need changing.

p

Patrick Brown
Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Toronto
Analytics and Informatics, Cancer Care Ontario
pbrown.ca

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

On 24/08/2016 8:09 AM, Patrick Brown wrote:
> Currently Makefiles for vignettes are only supported for .tex files.  Could
> the tools package be modified to allow file extensions to be specified for
> a vignette engine?  Having the pandoc pdf conversion in a Makefile rather
> than through R would be tidier in some cases.
>
> If I specify my vignette engine as
>
> ```
> tools::vignetteEngine(
>   'myengine',
>   pattern = '\\.[Rr](md|nw)$',
>   output = c('md', 'tex'),
>   ...
> )
> ```
>
> the `tools:::find_vignette_product` function could have
>
> `if (final) c("pdf", "html") else
unique(c("pdf", "html", "tex",
> engine$output))`
>
> that's probably the only line that would need changing.
Sounds reasonable.  Try it out in R-devel, and submit a patch.

Note that there is at least one other request for vignette improvements, 
i.e.
https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=16333, with a 
promise to submit a patch.  It hasn't arrived in 16 months.  So please 
don't promise a patch unless you intend to deliver.

Duncan Murdoch