R CMD Check does not finish the step "Checking PDF version of manual ..."

Question

I am creating an R package using R Studio version 0.99.489 together with the most current R development version on Windows 7. I created documentation .Rd files using roxygen2 and a .Rmd vignette using knitr. Until now everything worked out fine, but when I run the R CMD check within RStudio, the check gets stuck at the step "Checking PDF version of manual ...". I neither get an "OK" nor any error or warnings message. The step just does not proceed, even if I run it over night. I do not get any error or warning messages for the other steps as well, I have "OK"s everywhere.

Consequently, I do not find a PDF manual in the package.Rcheck folder. I already created the manual myself using R CMD Rd2pdf package, which worked out fine. I copied it to several locations within the package folder but this did not help at all.

I searched really a lot but I could not find any solution for this since I do not get any error message. I thought about administration, latex, or R version problems, but I cannot figure out if it is any of those or something else.

One thing I recognized is that when the package is build, it prints out:

CMD build "..PATH...\package" --no-resave-data \ --no-manual

although I did not specify the --no-manual option in the Build options from RStudio. Additionally, I did not find a way to change this. Might this be the problem?

Can anyone help me with this? I would really appreciate any hints. Please let me know if you need any output or any other information from me.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could do it yourself using:

shell('R CMD Rd2pdf . --output=man/figures/manual.pdf --force --no-preview')

This will create the PDF and save it to yourpackage/man/figures/manual.pdf.

I use it, so I know it works before I send it to CRAN.

Answer 2

I faced the same problem. It was really frustrating that it didn't give any error message. But then I tried this:

install.packages("devtools")

Actually I don't really know how it works, but I guess it also install other requirements and now the checking process is done via devtools and not directly by roxygen2 . Hope it helps.

Answer 3

I also come across with this problem, which I think it's a bug of RStudio . Try R CMD check <YOUR PROJECT NAME> in terminal, in my case, it finally generates an error,

* checking PDF version of manual without hyperrefs or index ... ERROR
Re-running with no redirection of stdout/stderr.