Dear All,
Further to this, we have had some discussion regarding supporting greater use of
HTML vignettes (https://github.com/rstats-gsod/gsod2022/issues/5). The initial
motivation was accessibility (PDF vignettes are not so accessible to users of
screen readers or other accessibility tools e.g. browser apps that change the
font or switch to dark mode). However, many users prefer HTML as it is easier to
browse online and integrates with IDEs like RStudio. Search engines can work
with them more effectively, helping people to find relevant packages. About a
third of packages on CRAN use HTML vignettes (have "knitr" or
"rmarkdown" in the VignetteBuilder field).
As discussed on this issue, some work can be done at the grass-roots level, to
encourage wider use of HTML vignettes. However, it would help to have a core
tool for creating HTML vignettes. An issue with rmarkdown is the number of
dependencies (apparently 18 non-core or recommended packages). However, Yihui
Xie is highly interested in developing a much leaner package depending only on
commonmark and is willing to put this on his agenda if people are really
interested in it, especially if R core can consider making it a recommended
package.
I realize that R core are keen to reduce rather than increase the number of
recommended packages. But this does seem to be a desirable core functionality.
Might R core consider integrating such a package in future?
Best wishes,
Heather
On Fri, Feb 4, 2022, at 8:02 PM, Heather Turner wrote:> Dear All,
>
> Yesterday Google announced Season of Docs 2022:
>
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/02/Announcing%20Season%20of%20Docs%202022.html.
>
> You may know that the R project participated for the first time last
> year with a project related to useR! and there is interest in us
> offering a project again this year.
>
> Organization applications open at the end of February, so now is the
> time for us to explore ideas for projects and line up potential
> mentors.
>
> Organization of GSoD is done on GitHub:
> https://github.com/rstats-gsod/gsod2022 and I have added a number of
> issues with ideas drawn from discussions on the R Contribution Working
> Group, R-Devel Slack, Forwards taskforce, and R Consortium Repositories
> Working Group. Feel free to comment on these issues or add your own
> suggestions.
>
> For more general discussion of GSoD, you can reply here, on the R-Devel
> Slack or at the next R Contribution Working Group (see the R
> Contribution Site for details of the Slack/working group:
> https://contributor.r-project.org/).
>
> Best wishes,
> Heather
>
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