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
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
texinfodocument to HTML - Once in HTML format, you can use
pandocto convert the HTML to markdown, manipulate the markdown and then re-convert to HTML
The build script is in the file scripts/build_website.R.
For each manual:
- Download the relevant
texinfomanual files and associated images and environment variables - Run
makeinfoto convert from.texito HTML - Run
pandocwith 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.
On Linux, you can easily install the makeinfo utility using
sudo apt install texinfo.
On Windows, makeinfo is installed as part of
RTools40.
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.