[Rd] CRAN task views: markdown? better .CSS?

[Achim Zeileis]

On Thu, 31 Jan 2013, Michael Friendly wrote:

> On 1/31/2013 12:01 PM, Achim Zeileis wrote:
>> Michael:
>> 
>>> CRAN task views are useful, but they seem difficult to write and maintain 
>>> because the XML format is rather limited (no sectioning)
>> 
>> What type of sectioning would you like to have? In the HTML part, you can 
>> use the usual structuring tools like <h*>, <p>, etc. It's not
>
> OK. I think you mean the <info> ... </info> section, where I failed to 
> read the vignette sufficiently closely, which talks about using HTML.
>> 
>>> and the <packagelist> must be maintained manually.
>> 
>> Yes, but I recently started adding tools to help checking this. Hopefully 
>> I'll also get round to add some more convenience features for this.
>
> Something simple might be a tool to scan the <info> ... </info> section 
> for <pkg> ... </pkg> mentions and just print a new <packagelist> section 
> to the console.  This would avoid having to remember what you added 
> recently and manually add to the <packagelist>

This is (almost) possible with the latest version of "ctv" (0.7-6). You 
can do:

pkg <- check_ctv_packages("MyView.ctv")
pkg

This shows mismatches between the <info> and <packagelist> sections and 
with CRAN. And then you can do:

writeLines(paste("  <pkg>", pkg[[1]], "</pkg>"))

possibly altering the indentation.

As I wrote in my previous post: I would like to better integrate these 
tools with read.ctv() but didn't get round to it, yet.

Best,
Z

> -Michael
>
>
> -- 
> Michael Friendly     Email: friendly AT yorku DOT ca
> Professor, Psychology Dept. & Chair, Quantitative Methods
> York University      Voice: 416 736-2100 x66249 Fax: 416 736-5814
> 4700 Keele Street    Web:   http://www.datavis.ca
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