Introduction to Rd2md
In Rd2md: Markdown Reference Manuals

PDF Reference Manual

The Reference Manual of a package exported as PDF is a terminal command shipped with R. Given you are in the root of your package, the following will create the PDF manual:

R CMD Rd2pdf -o ReferenceManual.pdf .

However, other formats are only possible converting a single Rd file to html, LaTeX or text and there is no option to create a reference manual in those formats.

This is where markdown comes in handy, as it can be further processed easily into a wide variety of formats and is also a go-to format for static website genererators.

Markdown Reference Manual

The main functionality of this package is to create the reference manual in markdown format.

However, packages can be available in either source format (from development) or as binary packages (from libraries). This package can extract the documentation files from both and create the reference manual.

From Package Source

The prerequisites are:

Path to package source readable
man directory with .Rd files is available
DESCRIPTION file is available in package root
Output directory is writeable

To create the reference manual from the package source, use:

render_refman()

This will default to the current working directory being the package root and the output file name to be <pkg-name>.md.

You can also specify the pkg variable and provide the path of the source code of the package and the output_file can be any file path, including file extension:

render_refman(
  pkg = "path/to/package_root",
  output_file = "path/to/output/reference_manual.md"
)

From Package Binary

The prerequisites are:

Path to package binaries (most likely library path) is readable
help directory with .rdb file is available
DESCRIPTION file is available in package root
Output directory is writeable

Remark: Package name must not be a directory in the current working directory, otherwise the function will try to read the source from that directory instead of searching the package in the R libraries.

To create the reference manual from the package binaries, use: