Prompt:
The goal of this week’s blog is to document what you are doing when things do not go according to plan.
Similar to previous exercises, we have a specific use case in mind: we want to build a book from a github repository.
What happens in practice usually, is that we run into some problems. So your real task turns into that of a bug-hunter and fixer. Luckily, you have a community (the class discussion board) who might be able to help you.
What we want: build a book
Build the html version of the 2nd edition for Hadley Wickham’s book Advanced R Programming from a github repository.
Steps:
- Clone the repository
https://github.com/hadley/adv-r. - Open the R project in the repository in RStudio.
- Activate the
Buildtab (by default in the top right panel). Click on theBuild Bookbutton. - The book will be available in html format as index.html
Deliverable (1): what is the last word in chapter 15? - You don’t have to answer this question, if things don’t work.
Answer: “pseudo-class” is the last word of Chapter 15. I obtained this answer by rendering the book into HTML format.
Deliverable (2): Write a paragraph on the biggest problem you encountered when you were building the book, (and how you managed to solve it.)
The biggest problem was knitting the book to pdf. I tried two LaTeX distributions (MiKTex and TinyTeX) and read several responses to similar questions on Stack Overflow and the Posit Community. Following the solutions, I installed, uninstalled and updated packages, and set the PATH by editing the system environment variables; however the error “LaTeX failed to compile _main.tex” persisted. Unfortunately I did not find a solution for this problem, but by opening a new Rmarkdown file, I typed Sys.which(“pdflatex”) and RStudio found the Tinytex package installed. I also successfully knitted a pdf document using this new file. Thus, there must be something wrong in the book script.