From ggrothendieck at myway.com  Wed Dec 29 19:15:30 2004
From: ggrothendieck at myway.com (Gabor Grothendieck)
Date: Wed Dec 29 19:15:41 2004
Subject: [Rd] Windows vignettes, shQuote, texi2dvi
Message-ID: <20041229181530.159EB39A9@mprdmxin.myway.com>


I noticed a shQuote fix for Windows in the svn logs.
Just wanted to point out that this will favorably 
affect texi2dvi on Windows which previously used
UNIX quoting and so generated an incorrect Windows
command.  (Note that texi2dvi is used when creating
vignettes.)

Another problem is that the recommended tex
distribution for Windows, fptex, does not have texi2dvi
in the first place. The alternative, MiKTeX, is harder
to install than fptex but instructions are available 
and it does have an equivalent to texi2dvi called texify.exe;
however, R still does not know about texify.exe 
resulting in additional installation hassles,
viz. setting the texi2dvi option or setting up a texi2dvi.bat
file yourself that calls texify.exe or just forgetting
about texi2dvi and manually running the necessary tex commands
when creating vignettes on Windows.

There are also additional problems related to using the
perl package-building scripts in Windows.   I can create the
zoo vignette using:

setwd("...whatever...")
Sweave("zoo.Rnw")
texi2dvi("zoo.tex")

provided I modify the source to texi2dvi to use the
appropriate quoting but even with that modification,
the perl package build scripts only build
the vignette as far as the zoo.tex file and I must
do the rest by hand so there is some problem with
the scripts or in how they interact with R.

I think the real ultimate solution is to replace the
perl scripts with R code to make them more maintainable.
This seems like the direction things are moving anyways
and I suspect that they were developed long before R
got to its current advanced state where R is just
as powerful as perl.


[Rd] Windows vignettes, shQuote, texi2dvi
Gabor Grothendieck