rstudio / r-manuals

A re-styled version of the R manuals

r-manuals

This project translates the official R manuals to quarto with the aim of lightly re-styling for better readability:

• Separate the manual into page for each chapter
• Code highlighting and formatting
• Footnotes in sidebar
• Improved searching

You can view the resulting https://rstudio.github.io/r-manuals

How this works

Background information

• Every hour the R source code (at SVN) gets copied to github, into the repo https://github.com/wch/r-source.
• The manuals are in the folder https://github.com/wch/r-source/tree/trunk/doc/manual
• Each manual is in file of format texinfo, the “GNU documentation format” (https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/)
• Since it is possible to render a texinfo document to HTML
• Once in HTML format, you can use pandoc to convert the HTML to markdown, manipulate the markdown and then re-convert to HTML

Building the manuals

The build script is in the file scripts/build_website.R.

In more detail

For each manual:

• Download the relevant texinfo manual files and associated images and environment variables
• Run makeinfo to convert from .texi to HTML
• Run pandoc with additional Lua filters to convert to markdown
• Perform additional processing and conversion in R
• Include the markdown files in a quarto book template
• Render the manual to quarto

Then combine the various quarto books into a quarto website.

Note about installing makeinfo

On Linux, you can easily install the makeinfo utility using sudo apt install texinfo.

On Windows, makeinfo is installed as part of RTools40.

Licensing

We provide the conversion code, i.e. this collection of R scripts and pandoc lua filters, under the MIT license.

The original R manuals are not under this MIT license. Instead, these manuals contain the following license:

Copyright © 1999–2021 R Core Team

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the R Core Team.

r-manuals's Issues

Loading / navigation seems slow

This will be frustrating in its lack of specifics. But I generally perceive that the manual sites are "slow". To be more specific, the one I only interact with much is the Writing R Extensions. I don't really know why that would be 🤔 But I've noticed it enough times, over a reasonably long time period, that I wanted to raise it.

We generally use GitHub Pages for pkgdown sites and I haven't noticed similar slowness there. So I'm not sure if there's any point in considering deployment to, say, Netlify.

Can those of you with more knowledge of the project speculate if there's anything about its structure that might explain the slowness? Of course, it's possible that I'm just getting unlucky.

The "double backtick problem"

Example .texi input:

... which can be found in the @file{src/library/@var{pkg}/man} directories ...

https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/a505a59a02f445e4918777a585270faee97c42e8/doc/manual/R-exts.texi#L6606

Leads to this in the official .html manual:

... which can be found in the <samp>src/library/<var>pkg</var>/man</samp> directories ...

But like this in the .html from the Quarto-ized manual:

... which can be found in the <var>src/library/``pkg</var><code>/man</code> directories ...

which looks like this:

---

Example .texi input:

\name@{@var{name}@}

https://github.com/wch/r-source/blob/a505a59a02f445e4918777a585270faee97c42e8/doc/manual/R-exts.texi#L6727

Leads to this in the official .html manual:

<code>\name{<var>name</var>}</code>

But like this in the .html from the Quarto-ized manual:

<var>\name{``name</var><code>}</code>

which looks like this:

Fix Lua Filter issue with newer Pandoc

See https://github.com/rstudio/r-manuals/runs/4853278099?check_suite_focus=true#step:7:34

Known issues

To fix:

• Fix TOC for concept index (the link in the letters) #3
• Markdown with unusual path doesn't convert to HTML, e.g. r-ints/_002eInternal-vs-_002ePrimitive.md #6

In R-intro:

• Broken footnotes in index (https://rstudio.github.io/r-manuals/r-intro/)
• Images don't appear (https://rstudio.github.io/r-manuals/r-intro/Probability-distributions.html)
• Broken multi-line definitions (https://rstudio.github.io/r-manuals/r-intro/Statistical-models-in-R.html#examples)

Index has links that are going nowhere

Thanks for putting this together as a quarto demo -- it's quite compelling.

I just tried to help somebody by looking up / referencing R_LIBS_USER which does of course exist in the index for the R Inst + Admin manual -- but its link

 https://rstudio.github.io/r-manuals/r-admin/Add_002don-packages.html#index-r_005flibs_005fuser

gets us nowhere. It should probably go to

 https://rstudio.github.io/r-manuals/r-admin/Add-on-packages.html#managing-libraries

Would be sweet if you can massage that into working...

Add https://rstudio.github.io/r-manuals/ as repo's URL

This will make it even easier to go back and forth between the source and rendered product.

https://rstudio.github.io/r-manuals/

Fix GH builds

Build is failling since some months now. Need to fix to get new manuals version

R-internals chapter on Internals vs Primitives isn't rendering

Hi team!

Great stuff on the rendered version of the R manuals.

The chapter on internals vs primitives is currently staying an md file instead of getting converted html. My guess is that it has something to do with the unusual chapter name that has periods.
https://github.com/rstudio/r-manuals/blob/gh-pages/r-ints/_002eInternal-vs-_002ePrimitive.md

Thanks!