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 doc/manual, on trunk for R-devel (https://github.com/wch/r-source/tree/trunk/doc/manual) and on a release branch/tag for released versions of R. By default this project builds the latest release — see Building the manuals.
• 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.

By default the build tracks the latest released version of R. Set the R_MANUALS_REF environment variable to build a different version:

# Latest released R (the default)
Rscript scripts/build_website.R

# R-devel (renders "Under development")
R_MANUALS_REF=trunk Rscript scripts/build_website.R

# A specific release series or exact release
R_MANUALS_REF=R-4-6-branch  Rscript scripts/build_website.R   # latest patched 4.6.x
R_MANUALS_REF=tags/R-4-6-1  Rscript scripts/build_website.R   # exact 4.6.1 release

The ref refers to a branch or tag in the wch/r-source mirror. When R_MANUALS_REF is unset, the build detects the newest release tag automatically.

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.