How to include Authors@R in the manual of R package?

Question

I have the following description file as part of my R package

Package: blah
Title: What the Package Does (one line, title case)
Version: 0.0.0.9000
Authors@R: person("Jon", "Snow", email = "[email protected]", role = c("aut", "cre"))
Description: What the package does (one paragraph).
Depends: R (>= 3.5.1)
License: What license is it under?
Encoding: UTF-8
LazyData: true
RoxygenNote: 6.1.0.9000

I have documented my code and would like to produce a manual that accompanies it. In a previous post, people have mentioned using the command R CMD Rd2pdf <work directory> and I managed to produce a manual.

The issue is that in my manual, the bit before R topics documented does not show the authors but everything else. I have installed packages such as devtools, knitr, roxygen2 and testthat. Any advice would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

If you want to include multiple authors, you have to wrap all persons in c().

See the DESCRIPTION of sf for example, which looks something like this:

Authors@R: 
  c(person(given = "Edzer",
           family = "Pebesma",
           role = c("aut", "cre"),
           email = "[email protected]",
           comment = c(ORCID = "0000-0001-8049-7069")),
    person(given = "Jeroen",
           family = "Ooms",
           role = "ctb",
           comment = c(ORCID = "0000-0002-4035-0289")),
    person(given = "Kirill",
           family = "Müller",
           role = "ctb"))

If there is only one author, you can simply write:

Author: Lax Chan

Answer 2

The Authors@R field is reformatted as Author when you build a source package. It won't appear in your source directory, so building the manual from that won't include it.

What you need to do is to build the tar.gz file from the source, then create the manual from that.

Since it seems you are using command line methods, this is done by

R CMD build <workdir>

which produces something like workdir.version.tar.gz. Unfortunately, Rd2pdf can't read this file directly, so you need two more steps. Move to a clean directory, and run

tar zxvf workdir.version.tar.gz
R CMD Rd2pdf workdir

to produce the manual from the built DESCRIPTION file.

(I don't think it would be a disaster if you unpacked the tarball on top of the original source, but it could cause confusion later if you change the DESCRIPTION file.)