README.Rmd

---
output: github_document
---

<!-- README.md is generated from README.Rmd. Please edit that file -->

```{r, include = FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>",
  fig.path = "man/figures/README-",
  out.width = "100%"
)
```

# r-manuals

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This project translates the [official R manuals](https://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html) to [quarto](https://quarto.org/) 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](https://rstudio.github.io/r-manuals/r-intro/)

## 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](https://pandoc.org/lua-filters.html) 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](https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/rtools40.html).

# 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.