pkgdown in Quarto?

[mcanouil]

With how easy it is to add pages to website and/or combine pages as a website, I was wondering about the possibility to include within a Quarto website one or several pkgdown-like documentation website.
Is a "translation" of pkgdown to the Quarto framework planned? (Kind of related to the multi-repo website #1282 in the idea I have in mind)

[cderv]

Here is a project by @edgararuiz to create package documentation in a quarto website with the same idea as pkgdown https://github.com/edgararuiz/ecodown

I believe sparklyr doc is a live version of it

https://spark.rstudio.com/

This seems like a good existing solution for those looking to use quarto feature for their doc website

Regarding including several package doc in same website would be only extending what has been already done.

[mcanouil]

Thanks for ecodown!

Should I assume nothing native/internal is on the project board of Quarto? To make it explicit in Python there is the "docstring" and pydoc module which kind of does what roxygen2 does. So having Quarto able to generate both website documentation seems a nice feature to me (I guess it is possible to do the same for observable and Julia).

[johnkerl]

Hi @cderv -- I'm trying to do some proof-of-concept work for rendering a package's API docs and examples/vignettes in Quarto.

The latter works just fine.

The former, after several hours over several days, I confess I am still struggling even to conceptualize. It's clear that if I have a .Rmd file I can go many places with it. That works. The hole I'm trying to fill is when my starting point is not hand-written .Rmd. Rather, the starting point is all the docstrings within R/*.R in my package's source code. What pkgdown does is map R/*.R docstrings to .html files. What I want is something -- anything -- that will, similarly, map R/*.R docstrings into any file format Quarto can handle (.Rmd, .qmd, etc.).

Cloning the sparklyr repo, as of today anyway, I couldn't find any way in which it is using ecodown. I'd love it if sparklyr were a usable example, but I can't find any way in which sparklyr is actually using ecodown -- I simply can't find anything to copy/imitate.

I've also poked with rmarkdown and ecodown and with neither of them have I found a way to generate markdown files starting from the docstrings in my package's R/*.R files. I acknowledge may be missing something obvious.

Does anyone here have any examples, however rudimentary or fragmentary, on approaches to solving this problem?

[cderv]

Cloning the sparklyr repo, as of today anyway, I couldn't find any way in which it is using ecodown. I'd love it if sparklyr were a usable example, but I can't find any way in which sparklyr is actually using ecodown -- I simply can't find anything to copy/imitate.

Spark website lives at https://github.com/rstudio/spark.rstudio.com and the website is built using ecodown (https://github.com/rstudio/spark.rstudio.com/blob/main/.github/workflows/ecodown.yaml). So this would be your example.

ecodown does not seem to be a package meant for external use, and more targeted for internal use. Though it is public so you can look at how ecodown::ecodown_build() works.

This would be your example.

I've also poked with rmarkdown and ecodown and with neither of them have I found a way to generate markdown files starting from the docstrings in my package's R/*.R files. I acknowledge may be missing something obvious.

I don't know what ecodown is really doing, but I think building on pkgdown feature would probably be the best. Starting point would probably be .Rd file and not .R file. based on https://pkgdown.r-lib.org/reference/rd2html.html probably which uses tools::parse_Rd(). I would try build on that. You could also try rd2html() for Rd to HTML, then convert to .md using Pandoc maybe (using rmarkdown or pandoc).

Overall, you probably just need to convert to .md and not .qmd.

I don't know any other tool parser that do .R from roxygen comment to .HTML or .md but you could probably create one.

[johnkerl]

Thanks @cderv !

[eitsupi]

You may interested in etiennebacher/altdoc#39 and etiennebacher/altdoc#46

[cderv]

Thanks for sharing this @eitsupi !