On 23/05/2015 9:15 PM, Imanuel Costigan wrote: > While a parsed HTML version of the NEWS.md file would be nice, I would like > something much simpler: being able to "see” this file in the Help pane in > RStudio
That isn't really any simpler. RStudio is just displaying HTML whenever it shows you anything in the Help pane. or being about to run something like show_news(“packagename”). Duncan mentioned issues with the news() function being able to process metadata represented in the Md file. What is the motivation of this structure? I don't understand your question. What issues did I mention? Or are you talking about Kurt's post, who first mentioned news()? And what structure are you talking about? Duncan Murdoch > > >> On 24 May 2015, at 10:51 am, Baptiste Auguie <baptiste.aug...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> >> John MacFarlane, the author of Pandoc, has been working on a project >> (http://commonmark.org/) to define a standard reference for Markdown*. There >> are already two reference implementations, one in javascript, the other in >> C: https://github.com/jgm/cmark >> >> Regards, >> >> baptiste >> >> * There was some initial controversy with the original author of markdown, >> but in the long term it's probably one of the more reliable sources to >> follow. >> >> On 24 May 2015 at 12:00, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On 23/05/2015 9:25 AM, Gábor Csárdi wrote: >>> On Sat, May 23, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Duncan Murdoch >>> <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com <mailto:murdoch.dun...@gmail.com>> wrote: >>> [...] >>> >>> I think the harder problem is display. CRAN can run pandoc, but can >>> users who install the package from source? I would expect some obscure >>> platforms (like Windows ;-) would not have it available. >>> >>> [...] >>> >>> I don't think pandoc is the best way to go with NEWS.md (and README.md, >>> actually). I would be surprised if many package maintainer built their >>> NEWS/README files with pandoc. They just look at them at GitHub (or >>> another similar service). >>> >>> GitHub has API for building HTML from >>> MarkDown: https://developer.github.com/v3/markdown/ >>> It can build GitHub-flavored MarkDown, in which case you get links to >>> GitHub issues, etc. or just plain MarkDown, like a GitHub README. >>> >>> If you don't want to rely on their service, then there are a multitude >>> of lightweight MarkDown parsers available, >>> e.g. https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it is a good one IMO. >> >> I wouldn't want R builds to depend on GitHub, so this sounds more >> interesting. I took a look at that website, and it looks problematic to >> me: the parser appears to be written in Javascript, and the install >> instructions (using "npm" and "bower", whatever those are) depend on >> some unstated prerequisites. In principle there's no reason not to >> allow R builds to depend on these things, but adding a dependency like >> that implies so much testing that I can't imagine anyone who could do it >> would want to. >> >> It's likely that a suitable parser could be written in some combination >> of C and R -- Markdown is not a complicated language. >> >>> Pandoc is great for vignettes, but you don't need its full power for >>> READMEs and especially not for NEWS files. In fact most NEWS.md files >>> look good as text. >> >> But we do need something, and it needs to be essentially universally >> available, or small enough to include in the R sources. I think R >> should eventually support Markdown as an acceptable language for >> documentation (including NEWS.md, and also help files for functions), >> but I think the effort required to do it now is too much. >> >> Duncan Murdoch >> >>> >>> Gabor >>> >> >> ______________________________________________ >> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel >> > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
