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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

pkgdown (development version)

  • New clean_cache() function removes the contents of the cache directory (#2718).
  • pkgdown now depends on R >= 4.0.0 (#2714)

pkgdown 2.1.0

CRAN release: 2024-07-06

Major changes

  • Added @olivroy and @salim-b as pkgdown authors in recognition of their contributions.
  • build_articles() and build_article() now support articles/vignettes written with quarto (version 1.5 and above). Combining the disparate quarto and pkgdown templating systems is a delicate art, so while I’ve done my best to make it work, there may be some rough edges. So please file an issue you encounter quarto features that don’t work quite right. Learn more in vignette("quarto")(#2210).
  • New light switch makes it easy for users to switch between light and dark themes for the website (based on work in bslib by @gadenbuie). For now this behaviour is opt-in with template.light-switch: true but in the future we may turn it on automatically. See the customization vignette for details (#1696).
  • New vignette("translations") that discusses non-English sites including how to submit new translations (#2605).
  • New vignette("accessibility") describes what manual tasks you need to perform to make your site as accessible as possible (#2344).
  • New template.math-rendering allows you to control how math is rendered across your site. The default uses mathml which is low-dependency, but has the lowest fidelity. You can also use mathjax, the previous default, and katex, a faster alternative. (#1966).
  • All external assets (JS, CSS, fonts) are now directly included in the site instead of fetched from external CDN (@salim-b, #2249)
  • YAML validation has been substantially improved so you should get much clearer errors if you have made a mistake (#1927). Please file an issue if you find a case where the error message is not helpful.

Lifecycle changes

  • autolink_html() was deprecated in pkgdown 1.6.0 and now warns every time you use it. downlit::downlit_html_path() should be used instead.
  • build_site(document) and build_reference(document) has been removed after being deprecated in pkgdown 1.4.0. devel should be used instead.
  • preview_page() has been deprecated (#2650).
  • Bootstrap 3 has been deprecated. It was superseded in December 2021, and now we’re starting to more directly encourage folks to move away from it.

Front end changes

  • When built on GitHub, source urls now use the name of the current upstream branch (rather than HEAD), which is more likely to generate correct links (#2597).
  • The search dropdown has been tweaked to look more like the other navbar menu items (#2338).
  • Improve HTML5 compliance (#2369):
    • No longer support IE9 or earlier
    • Strip trailing whitespace
    • Label <nav>s and improve navbar html.
  • Tweaked navbar display on mobile so that long titles in drop downs (e.g. article titles) are now wrapped, and the search input spans the full width (#2512).
  • The title for the “Reference” page is now “Package index” since this page might contain more than just function details (#2181).
  • Very wide words are now automatically broken across lines and hyphenated (when possible) when they’d otherwise create a horizontal scrollbar on mobile (#1888).
  • The mobile version of pkgdown sites no longer has a scrollburglar (a small amount of horizontal scroll) (#2179, @netique).
  • Anchors are displayed when they’re the target of a link.
  • New translation for “Search site”, the label applied to the search box for screenreaders. This was previously incorrectly labelled as “Toggle navigation” (#2320).
  • pkgdown no longer overrides the default selection colours. This improves accessibility for users who have set their own colours in their browser settings (#2139, @glin).
  • If you put a dropdown menu (e.g. articles) on the right hand side of the navbar, it will now be right aligned. This makes longer titles more likely to stay on the page (#2421).
  • BS5 templates no longer include empty link to logo when none exists (#2536).
  • Updated translations from @jplecavalier, @dieghernan, @krlmlr, @LDalby, @rich-iannone, @jmaspons, and @mine-cetinkaya-rundel (#2659).

_pkgdown.yaml

  • Anywhere you can use _pkgdown.yml, you can now use _pkgdown.yaml (#2244).
  • Custom navbars that specify icon but not aria-label will now generate a message reminding you to provide one for to improve accessibility (#2533).
  • The repo.source.url field no longer requires a trailing slash (#2017).
  • The template.bslib item now also accepts a bootswatch key (@gadenbuie, #2483).
  • You can now choose where the search box is placed with the “search” navbar component. This has been documented for a very long time, but as far as I can tell, never worked (#2320). If you have made your own template with a custom navbar, you will need to remove the <form> with role="search" to avoid getting two search boxes.

Minor improvements and bug fixes

  • pkgdown now uses httr2 instead of httr (#2600).

  • Mathjax now uses version 3.2.2.

  • The addin now runs build_site() instead of build_site_external(), which generally should be more reliable (#2252).

  • <source> tags now have their srcref attributes tweaked in the same way that the src attributes of <img> tags are (#2402).

  • as.pkgdown() will no longer prompt you to install a missing template package from CRAN, since these are almost always found in GitHub (#2076).

  • build_articles() now recognises a new external-articles top-level field that allows you to define articles that live in other packages (#2028).

  • build_article() no longer has a data argument. This is technically a breaking change, but I can’t figure out why anyone would have ever used it.

  • build_*() (apart from build_site()) functions no longer default to previewing in interactive sessions since they now all emit specific links to newly generated files.

  • build_article() now translates the “Abstract” title if it’s used.

  • build_article() now escapes html characters in the title (#2286).

  • build_article() no longer generates the wrong source link when you build your site outside of the root directory (#2172).

  • build_articles() now reports if you are missing alt-text for any images (#2357).

  • build_articles() now drops a section called “internal”. This allows you to have articles that either aren’t indexed at all or are included manually elsewhere in the navbar (#2205).

  • build_home() now correctly escapes special HTML characters in the bibtex citation (#2022).

  • build_home() no longer checks if the README is missing any images. This check is now performed in build_site(), after build_articles() so you can refer to images created by vignettes with warnings (#2194).

  • build_home() now includes the contents of inst/AUTHORS on the authors page (#2506).

  • build_home_index() now reports when rendering the home page (#2544).

  • build_home_index() now renders math if you use it in your home page (#2263).

  • build_news() now works if your package has been archived at some point (#2687).

  • build_news() only syntax highlights the page once, not twice, which prevents every block of R code getting a blank line at the start (#2630).

    1 + 1

  • build_reference() no longer displays \dontshow{} or \testonly{} blocks in examples. It will run the code in \dontshow{}; it won’t run the code in \testonly{}(#2188).

  • build_reference() does a better job of parsing \value{} blocks (#2371).

  • build_reference() now generates the usage that users actually type for infix and replacement methods (#2303).

  • build_reference() now automatically translates --, ---, ``, and '' to their unicode equivalents (#2530).

  • build_reference() now supports \Sexpr[results=verbatim] (@bastistician, #2510).

  • build_reference() adds anchors to arguments making it possible to link directly to an argument, if desired. A subtle visual treatment makes it easy to see which argument is targeted (#2228).

  • build_reference() now automatically renders any tables created by gt (#2326).

  • build_reference() matches usage for S3 and S4 methods to the style used by R 4.0.0 and later (#2187).

  • build_reference_index() now displays function lifecycle badges next to the function name (#2123). The badges are extracted only from the function description. You can now also use has_lifecycle() to select functions by their lifecycle status.

  • build_redirects() is now exported to make it easier to document (#2500).

  • build_redirects() now automatically adds redirects for topic aliases. This matches the behaviour of ? and will help keep links stable in the long term (#1876).

  • build_redirects() now reports which redirects it is generating.

  • build_site() automatically runs pkgdown_sitrep() at the start of the process (#2380).

  • build_sitemap() no longer includes redirected pages (#2582).

  • check_pkgdown() and pkgdown_sitrep() have been unified so that they both report on the same problems. They now only differ in the style of their output: pkgdown_sitrep() reports whether each category is ok or not ok, while check_pkgdown() errors on the first issue (#2463).

  • init_site() will no longer automatically build favicons on CI systems (e.g. GHA). This is an expensive operation that uses an external service so it should only be run locally (#2553).

  • init_site() once again describes one copy per line, and now uses a better prefix when copying assets from pkgdown itself (#2445).

  • pkgdown_sitrep()/check_pkgdown() now check that you have up-to-date favicons if you have a package logo.

  • template_reference() and template_article() now only add backticks to function names if needed (#2561).

  • vignette("search") has been removed since BS3 is deprecated and all the BS5 docs are also included in build_search() (#2564).

pkgdown 2.0.9

CRAN release: 2024-04-18

  • Fixes for regressions in 2.0.8:

    • Output links generated when building the site work once again (#2435).

    • pkgdown once again uses Bootstrap version specified in a template package (@gadenbuie, #2443).

  • Front-end improvements:

    • The skip link now becomes visible when focussed (#2138). Thanks to @glin for the styles!

    • The left and right footers no longer contain an extra empty paragraph tag and the footer gains additional padding-top to keep the whitespace constant (#2381).

    • Clipboard buttons report their action again (“Copied!”) (#2462)

  • It is now easier to preview parts of the website locally interactively. build_reference_index() and friends will call init_site() automatically instead of erroring (@olivroy, #2329).

  • build_article() gains a new new_process argument which allows to build a vignette in the current process for debugging purposes. We’ve also improved the error messages and tracebacks if an article fails to build, hopefully also making debugging easier (#2438).

  • build_article_index() and build_reference_index() use an improved BS5 template that correctly wraps each section description in a <div>, rather than a <p>. This eliminates an empty pargraph tag that preceded each section description (#2352).

  • build_home() no longer errors when you have an empty .md file (#2309). It alos no longer renders Github issue and pull request templates (@hsloot, #2362)

  • build_news() now warns if it doesn’t find any version headings, suggesting that that NEWS.md is structured incorrectly (#2213).

  • build_readme() now correctly tweaks links to markdown files that use an anchor, e.g. foo.md#heading-name (#2313).

  • build_reference_index() gives more informative errors if your contents field is malformed (#2323).

  • check_pkgdown() no longer errors if your intro vignette is an article is not listed in _pkgdown.yml (@olivroy #2150).

  • data_template() gives a more informative error if you’ve misspecified the navbar (#2312).

pkgdown 2.0.8

CRAN release: 2024-04-10

pkgdown 2.0.7

CRAN release: 2022-12-14

pkgdown 2.0.6

CRAN release: 2022-07-16

  • If you’re using an RStudio daily, output file names are now clickable, previewing the generated HTML in the browser (#2157).

  • Getting started vignette no longer needs to be included in the articles index (#2150).

  • If there aren’t any functions in the \usage{} block, then pkgdown will now shows all aliases on the reference index, rather than just the topic name (#1624).

pkgdown 2.0.5

CRAN release: 2022-06-23

pkgdown 2.0.4

CRAN release: 2022-06-10

  • New check_pkgdown() provides a lightweight way to check that your _pkgdown.yml is valid without building the site (#2056). Invalid _pkgdown.yml now consistently generates errors both locally and on CI (#2055).

  • build_article() now supports inline markdown in the title (#2039).

  • build_home() no longer shows development status badges on the released version of the site (#2054).

  • build_news() support automated @username links in more places (#2030).

  • build_reference():

    • You can once again exclude topics from the reference index with - (#2040).

    • Inline markdown in titles and subtitles is now supported(#2039).

    • Package logos will be automatically stripped from the .Rd you don’t end up with two on one page. (#2083).

    • \figure{file}{alternative text} with multiline alt text is now parsed correctly (#2080)

    • roxygen 7.2.0 output for generic code blocks (#2092, @jabenninghoff) is processed correctly.

  • Front end changes:

    • Automatically added links in code blocks are now styled less aggressively, so they occupy less visual weight on the page (#2007).

    • All article pages are given class col-md-9 for consistency with other pages (#2045).

    • Fixed width HTML widgets are sized correctly (@dmurdoch, #2062).

    • Footnotes work with more contents, including code (@banfai, #2042).

    • Navbar components now accept target argument (#2089, @JSchoenbachler).

  • New syntax highlighting themes a11y-light, a11y-dark, monochrome-light, monochrome-dark, and solarized

pkgdown 2.0.3

CRAN release: 2022-04-24

  • Fixes for R CMD check

pkgdown 2.0.2

CRAN release: 2022-01-13

  • New Korean (ko) translation thanks to @mrchypark and @peremen (#1944). New Danish (dk) translation thanks to @LDalby.

  • build_articles() now adjusts the heading levels of vignettes/articles that use <h1> as section headings to ensure that there’s one top-level heading (#2004). This ensures that there’s one <h1>, the title, on each page, and makes the TOC in the sidebar work correctly.

  • build_home_index() no longer spuriously complains about missing images if you use plots in your README.Rmd (#1980, #1977). It no longer tweaks the src path for <img> tags with absolute paths (#1955).

  • build_news() once again works if NEWS.md uses <h1> headings (#1947).

  • build_reference() now correctly interprets title: internal: it removes the section from the reference index and it doesn’t list the topics in that section as missing (#1958).

  • build_reference() now gives a correct hint when the reference index YAML is not formatted correctly (e.g. empty item, or item such as “n” that needs to be escaped with quotes to not be interpreted as Boolean) (#1995).

  • deploy_to_branch() gains a subdir argument, allowing you to deploy the site to a subdirectory (@gadenbuie, #2001).

  • Front end changes:

    • The navbar gets a little more space after the version number, and aligns the baseline with rest of the navbar (#1989).

    • Long lines in code output once again scroll, rather than being wrapped. While this is different to what you’ll see in the console, it’s a better fit for web pages where the available code width varies based on the browser width (#1940).

    • scrollspy (which highlights the “active” heading in the sidebar) now computes the offset dynamically which makes it work better on sites with taller navbars (#1993).

    • Fixed js issues that occurred on pages without a table of contents (@gadenbuie, #1998).

    • When htmlwidgets with jQuery or Bootstrap dependencies are used in examples or articles, pkgdown’s versions of jQuery and Boostrap will take precedence over the versions used by the htmlwidget (@gadenbuie, #1997).

  • pkgdown no longer includes bundled author metadata for Hadley Wickham, RStudio, or the RConsortium, since there are now ways to include this meta data in template packages, and special casing these three entities feels increasingly weird (#1952).

pkgdown 2.0.1

CRAN release: 2021-12-03

  • Fix CRAN failures.

  • Reference sections are de-duplicated correctly (#1935).

  • Usage sections only generated for topics that have them; usage correctly displayed with BS3 (#1931)

  • Empty \value{} no longer errors (#1930).

pkgdown 2.0.0

CRAN release: 2021-11-30

New authors

@maelle is now a pkgdown author in recognition of her significant and sustained contributions. She was the powerhouse behind many of the improvements in this release, particularly the switch to bootstrap 5, improvements to customisation, and implementation of local search.

Bootstrap 5

  • pkgdown can style your site with Bootstrap 5 (with help from @jayhesselberth, @apreshill, @cpsievert). Opt-in by setting boostrap version in your _pkgdown.yml:

    template:
  bootstrap: 5

  • We reviewed site accessibility and made a number of small improvements: (#782, #1553):

    • Default font is larger and links are always underlined.
    • Heading anchors use aria-hidden to reduce noise for screenreader users.
    • Navbar dropdowns has improved aria-labelledby.
    • The default GitHub/GitLab links gain an aria-label; use for other icons is now supported, and encouraged in the docs.
    • Syntax highlighting uses a new more accessible colour scheme, designed by Alison Hill (#1536)
    • A skip link makes it easier to get directly to the page contents (#1827).

  • In-line footnotes mean you can read asides next to the text they refer to.

  • Articles support tabsets, as in R Markdown. (@JamesHWade, #1667).

  • Other minor styling improvements:

    • The active item in TOC is indicated with background colour, rather than a border.
    • If present, the package logo is shown on all pages near the header.
    • Section anchors now appear on the right (making them usable on mobile phones) (#1782).
    • The TOC is scrollable independently of the main content. This makes it more useful on long pages with many headings (#1610).
    • The sidebar is shown at the bottom of the page on narrow screens.
    • Function arguments and the reference index (#1822) use definition lists (<dl>) instead of tables. This gives more room for long argument names/lists of function and detailed descriptions, and displays better on mobile.
    • Links on the homepage no longer show the full url in the text.
    • The default navbar no longer includes a home icon - this took up precious horizontal space and wasn’t very useful since there was already a link to the home page immediately to its left (#1383).

Local search

  • pkgdown now supports local searching (i.e. searching without an external service), and is enabled by default for Bootstrap 5 sites since no set-up is needed (#1629, with help from @gustavdelius in #1655 and @dieghernan & @GregorDeCillia in #1770).

  • pkgdown builds a more exhaustive sitemap.xml even for websites built with Bootstrap 3. This might change Algolia results if you use Algolia for search (#1629).

Customisation

  • New vignette("customise") documents all the ways you can customise your site, including the new options described below (#1573).

  • Sites can be easily themed with either bootswatch themes or by selectively overriding the bslib variables used to generate the CSS. pkgdown now uses scss for its own Bootstrap css tweaks, which means that you can customise more of the site from within _pkgdown.yml.

  • You can pick from a variety of built-in syntax highlighting themes (#1823). These control the colours (and background) of code in <pre> tags.

  • pkgdown can now translate all the text that it generates (#1446): this means that if you have a package where the docs are written in another language, you can match all the pkgdown UI to provide a seamless experience to non-English speakers. Activate the translations by setting the lang in _pkgdown.yml:

    lang: fr

    pkgdown includes translations for:

    If you’re interested in adding translations for your language please file an issue and we’ll help you get started.

  • Template packages can now provide inst/pkgdown/_pkgdown.yml which is used as a set of defaults for _pkgdown.yml. It can be used to (e.g.) provide author definitions, select Bootstrap version and define bslib variables, and customise the sidebar, footer, navbar, etc. (#1499).

  • New includes parameters in-header, before-body, and after-body make it easy to add arbitrary HTML to every page. Their content will be placed at the end of the <head> tag, right below the opening <body> tag, and before the closing tag </body> respectively (#1487). They match the bookdown options in_header, before_body and after_body.

    Additionally, you can use before_title, before_navbar, and after_navbar to add arbitrary HTML into the navbar/page header; they will appear to the left of the package name/version, and to the left and right of the navigation links respectively (#1882).

  • Authors configuration is more flexible (#1516). You can now:

    • Choose the roles used for filtering authors for the sidebar and footer.
    • Choose the text before authors in the footer.
    • Add text before and after the authors list in the sidebar.
    • Add text before and after the authors list of the authors page.

  • Sidebar specification is more flexible (#1443, #1488, #1502). You can now:

    • Change the order of sidebar elements.
    • Add custom sidebar sections (with Markdown/HTML text).
    • Add a table of contents to the home page.
    • Completely suppress the sidebar.
    • Provide your own HTML for the navbar.

  • Footer specification is more flexible (#1502). You can now:

    • Change the placement of elements on the left and right.
    • Add text to the left and right (or even remove/replace default text)

  • You can now exclude all default components from the navbar (#1517).

  • Expert users can now override layout templates provided by pkgdown or template packages by placing template files in pkgdown/templates (@gadenbuie, #1897).

New features

  • pkgdown now supports redirects (#1259, @lorenzwalthert). The following yaml demonstrates the syntax, with old paths on the left and new paths/URLs on the right.

    redirects:
  - ["articles/old-vignette-name.html", "articles/new-vignette-name.html"]
  - ["articles/another-old-vignette-name.html", "articles/new-vignette-name.html"]
  - ["articles/yet-another-old-vignette-name.html", "https://pkgdown.r-lib.org/dev"]

  • Use HTML classes pkgdown-devel or pkgdown-release to declare that certain content should appear only on the devel or release site. Use the class pkgdown-hide for content that should only appear only on GitHub/CRAN (#1299).

  • New pkgdown_sitrep() function reports whether the site is set up correctly; in particularly it currently reports if auto-linking will work (#1478).

Code

  • Styling for errors, warnings, and messages has been tweaked. Messages are now displayed the same way as output, and warnings and errors are bolded, not coloured. This is part of a suite of changes that aim to give package authors greater control over the appearance of messages, warnings, and errors.

  • Long lines in code output are now wrapped, rather than requiring scrolling. This better matches rmarkdown::html_document() and what you see in the console.

  • build_reference() now allows linking to topics from other packages (either function names e.g. rlang::is_installed or topic names e.g.  sass::font_face). (#1664)

  • build_reference() now runs examples with options(rlang_interactive = FALSE) (ensuring non-interactive behaviour in functions that use rlang::is_interactive()), options(cli.dynamic = FALSE), Sys.setenv(RSTUDIO = NA) and Sys.setLocale("LC_COLLATE", "C") (#1693). It also runs pkgdown/pre-reference.R before and pkgdown/post-reference.R after examples. These allow you to do any setup or teardown operations you might need (#1602).

  • A reference index section with title: internal is now silently dropped, allowing you to suppress warnings about topics that are not listed in the index (#1716).

  • Code blocks are now highlighted according to their declared language (e.g. yaml) if the documentation was built with roxygen2 7.1.2 or later (#1690, #1692).

  • New pkgdown_print() allows you to control how your objects are rendered in examples. It includes built-in handling for htmlwidgets and “browseable” HTML so pkgdown output now more closely resembles what you see in RStudio. Added extension points to make HTML widgets (and RGL in particular) work in rendered examples (@dmurdoch).

  • You can globally set the width of code output (in reference and articles) with

    code:
  width: 50

  • Articles now render output styles created by cli/crayon (#1556).

  • When copy and pasting code blocks, lines containing output (e.g. #>) are automatically omitted (#1675).

  • Auto-linking improvements:

    • Links to inherited R6 methods now work correctly for both internal (#1173, @vandenman) and external (#1476) parent classes.

    • Linking no longer fails if a package contains duplicated Rd aliases.

    • Correctly link to reference pages when the \name{} entry doesn’t match the file name (@dmurdoch, #1586; #1676).

Articles

  • Article subtitle, author and date (specified in the YAML frontmatter) are now correctly omitted from the article table of contents in the sidebar (@maxheld83, #1428).

  • Support for as_is: true and non-default output formats for vignettes/ articles has been somewhat improved. Support is fundamentally limited due to the challenges of integrating HTML from output formats that pkgdown doesn’t know about, but it should be a little more reliable and a little better documented (#1757, #1764).

  • build_articles() no longer fails if you have a directory underneath vignettes with a .Rmd extension (#1425).

  • build_articles() now correctly handles links to images in man/figures (which have the form ../man/figures) (#1472).

  • build_articles() again sets the theme argument of the document format to NULL when as_is: true but lets users override this via the theme argument of the output format.

  • build_articles() and build_home() now warn if you have images that won’t render on the website because they’re in unsupported directories (#1810). Generally, it’s only safe to refer to figures in man/figures and vignettes.

  • Articles stored in vignettes/articles are moved up one level so that they appear in articles/ on the website. Previously, they would appear in articles/articles, so build_redirects() automatically adds redirects for any articles in the vignettes/articles directory (@gadenbuie #1911).

HTML, CSS and JS

  • New template option trailing_slash_redirect that allows adding a script to redirect your-package-url.com to your-package-url.com/ (#1439, @cderv, @apreshill).

  • External links now get the class external-link. This makes them easier to style with CSS (#881, #1491).

  • Duplicated section ids are now de-duplicated; this makes pkgdown work better with the documentation of R6 classes.

  • Updated CSS styles from pandoc to improve styling of reference lists (#1469).

Deployment

  • build_site_github_pages() has been extracted out of deploy_site_github() to make it easier to decouple building and deployment, and so we can take advantage of standard deployment actions (#1756).

  • deploy_to_branch() now calls git remote set-branches with --add to avoid overwriting the existing remote.{remote}.fetch value (@kyleam, #1382). It also now cleans out the website directory by default; revert to previous behaviour with clean = FALSE (#1394).

  • build_reference() will error if envar CI is true and there are missing topics (@ThierryO, #1378).

  • You can override the auto development mode detected from the package version by setting env var PKGDOWN_DEV_MODE to release or devel. This is useful if your package uses a different convention to indicate development and release versions (#1081).

Other minor improvements and bug fixes

  • \special{} tags with complex contents are rendered correctly (@klmr, #1744).

  • \arguments{} and \value{} do a better job of handling mingled items and text (#1479). The contents of \value{} are now shown immediately after \arguments{}.

  • The default “branch” for linking to the file sources is HEAD, which will work regardless of whether your default branch is called “main” or “master”.

  • Non-ORCID comments in Authors@R are now more usable: if such comments exist, the sidebar gains a link to the authors page, where they are displayed (#1516).

  • Citations with and without text versions are better handled, and text citations are correctly escaped for HTML (@bastistician, #1507).

  • README badges in a single paragraph placed between <!-- badges: end -->and <!-- badges: end --> comments are again detected (#1603).

  • The 404 page (default or from .github/404.md) is no longer built in the development mode (see ?build_site) as e.g. GitHub pages only uses the 404.html in the site root (#1622).

  • All links on the 404 pages (navbar, scripts, CSS) are now absolute if there is an URL in the configuration file (#1622).

  • The version tooltip showed in the top navbar is now only set if you’ve explicitly set the development.mode in _pkgdown.yml (#1768).

  • All heading (e.g. headings on the reference index page, and the arguments heading on the reference pages) now get anchors (#1747).

  • Use autolink_bare_uris for Pandoc above version 2.0 (@marcosmolla, #1618).

  • pkgdown now recognizes GitLab URLs to the source repository and adds the corresponding icon to the navbar (#1493). It also supports GitLab subgroups (@salim-b, #1532).

  • Links for GitHub Enterprise and GitLab Enterprise repositories are detected by assuming such host address begin with github. or gitlab. (@ijlyttle, #1452).

  • The rules drawn by the CLI (as for example, in build_site()) are protected against very narrow terminal windows (@maxheld83, #1435).

  • Google Site Verification (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9008080?hl=en) can now be configured for pkgdown sites.

  • build_rmarkdown_format sets html_document(anchor_sections = FALSE) to avoid needless dependencies (@atusy, #1426).

  • Jira issues in NEWS can be automatically linked by setting your project name

    1. with repo: jira_projects: [...] and specifying a custom issue URL with repo: url: issue: ... in _pkgdown.yml (@jonkeane, #1466).

  • build_home() always creates citation information for the authors page, using metadata from DESCRIPTION when there is no inst/CITATION file, and links to this from the sidebar (#1904).

  • build_news() no longer breaks with URLs containing numeric fragments (@krassowski, #1456), recognises more styles of release heading (#1437), and generate stable IDs using a the combination of the heading slug and package number. (@Bisaloo, #1015)

pkgdown 1.6.1

CRAN release: 2020-09-12

  • The article index (used for autolinking vignettes across packages) once again works (#1401).

pkgdown 1.6.0

CRAN release: 2020-09-07

Major changes

  • pkgdown now uses the new downlit package for all syntax highlighting and autolinking (in both reference topics and vignettes). There should be very little change in behaviour because the code in downlit was extracted from pkgdown, but this makes it easier to use pkgdown’s nice linking/highlighting in more places (#1234).

  • pkgdown now uses the ragg::agg_png() device to generate example figures. This should be a little faster and produce higher quality output. Learn more at https://ragg.r-lib.org (#1320).

Minor improvements and bug fixes

Rd translation

  • \special{} support inside \usage{} added to allow non-standard R usage syntax (@klmr, #1345).

  • #ifdef and #ifndef are now supported; the “current” OS is hard coded to “unix” to ensure reproducible output regardless of where you build the website (#1384).

  • Nested \subsection{}s now generate appropriate heading levels (h3, h4, h5 etc) (#1377), and get anchor links (#1389).

  • \preformatted{} no longer double escapes its contents (#1311).

Articles and vignettes

  • build_articles() no longer sets the theme argument of the document format to NULL when as_is: true. This should allow it to work with a wider range of output formats including bookdown::html_vignette2() and friends (@GegznaV, #955, #1352).

  • When build_article() fails, it gives the complete failure message (#1379).

  • Markdown header attributes are now processed in all markdown files (@jonkeane, #1343)

Auto-linking and syntax highlighting

  • The branch used for source linking can be configured by setting repo: branch: branch_name in _pkgdown.yml (@jonkeane, #1355):

    repo:
  branch: main

  • autolink_html() is (soft) deprecated. Please use downlit::downlit_html_path() instead.

  • Highlighting of empty expressions works once more (#1310).

  • New deploy$install_metadata option in _pkgdown.yml. Setting it to true will store site metadata in the package itself, allowing offline access for packages that to autolink to the package’s website (@mstr3336, #1336).

Other

  • You can now control the background colour of plots with the figures.bg option (it is transparent by default, and given a white background by css). See ?build_reference for an example.

  • HTML is automatically stripped from the page title (#1318).

  • Suppressing CRAN dates in news file now actually works.

  • All HTTP requests are now retried upon failure (@jameslamb, #1305).

  • Setting clean = TRUE in deploy_site_github() removes old files from the deployed site before building a new one (#1297).

pkgdown 1.5.1

CRAN release: 2020-04-09

  • Syntax highlighting works on Windows once more (#1282).

  • pkgdown no longer fails if your .Rd files have duplicated \aliases as were produced by an older version of roxygen2 (#1290).

  • Rendering empty .md file now returns empty string (#1285).

  • build_articles_index() is now exported to rapidly rebuild the index (#1281)

  • deploy_site_github() now accepts a host argument to specify alternate hosts (e.g., Github enterprise) (@dimagor, #1165) and once again works as intended on Travis-CI (@jimhester, #1276).

pkgdown 1.5.0

CRAN release: 2020-03-25

New features

  • The articles index page and navbar have been overhauled. There are two major new features in this release:

    • The articles index page now displays article descriptions, taken from YAML metadata belonging to each article. This lets you provide more context about each article and describe why one might want to read it (#1227).

    • The articles navbar is now also controlled by the articles section in _pkgdown.yml. The ordering of the sections, and articles within them, control the order of the articles in the navbar, and you can use the new navbar field to control whether or not each section appears in the navbar (#1101, #1146).

  • The reference index now has two levels of heading hierarchy: title and subtitle (#327).

  • Tables of contents in sidebars now use bootstrap-toc; this considerably improves navigation for long articles and reference pages.

  • You can now control the links to source files (in reference pages and articles) and issues and users (in the NEWS) with new repo$url config option (#1238). This makes it easier to use pkgdown with GitHub enterprise, packages in subdirectories, and other source hosts (like bitbucket).

    repo:
  url:
    home: https://github.com/r-lib/pkgdown/
    source: https://github.com/r-lib/pkgdown/blob/main/
    issue: https://github.com/r-lib/pkgdown/issues/
    user: https://github.com/

    The individual components (e.g. path, issue number, username) are pasted on the end of these urls so they should have trailing /s.

    You don’t need to set these links for GitLab, as pkgdown now detects GitLab urls automatically (since they use the same structure as GitHub) (#1045).

  • There’s much richer control over Open Graph and Twitter metadata for the whole site and for individual articles. See new vignette("metadata") for details (@gadenbuie, #936).

  • New deploy_to_branch() function to build and deploy a site to a branch, defaulting to gh-pages for use with GitHub Pages. This is used in our recommended GitHub action workflow for automatically building and deploying pkgdown sites for packages on GitHub (@jimhester, #1221).

  • Updated JS libraries: jquery 3.3.1 -> 3.4.1; bootswatch 3.3.7 -> 3.4.0; bootstrap 3.3.7 -> bootstrap 3.4.1; docsearch 2.6.1 -> 2.6.3; fontawesome 5.11.1 -> 5.12.1; headroom.js 0.9.44 -> 0.11.0; clipboard.js 2.0.4 -> 2.0.6 (@jayhesselberth).

Auto-linking improvements

  • Examples and Rmd now use exactly the same syntax highlighting strategy.

  • In examples and Rmd, calls of the form current_package::foo now get a local link (#1262).

  • \preformatted{} blocks are now highlighted and linked if they parse as R code (#1180).

  • library(pkgdown) is now automatically linked to the reference index for “pkgdown” not the documentation for library() (#1161).

  • help("topic") is now automatically linked to the documentation for “topic”, not to the documentation for help() (#1210)

Minor improvements and bug fixes

Articles

  • build_home() no longer uses (unrendered) README.Rmd or index.Rmd if corresponding .md files are not found.

  • build_article() failures now print more information to help you debug the problem (#952).

  • The name of the vignette mapped to the “Get started” entry in the navbar is now more flexible. You can use an article (e.g articles/{pkgname}) and if your package has a . in its name you can replace it with - to generate a valid article name (e.g. the get started vignette for pack.down would be pack-down) (#1166).

Deployment

News

See additional details in ?build_news:

  • You can optionally suppress the CRAN release dates added to the news page (#1118).

  • Multi-page news style gets a better yaml specification (the old style will continue to work so no need to change existing YAML).

Reference

  • A topic named index will not longer clobber the reference index (#1110).

  • Topic names/aliases on reference index are now escaped (#1216).

  • build_reference() gives better warnings if your _pkgdown.yml is constructed incorrectly (#1025).

  • New has_keyword() topic selector for reference. has_keyword("datasets") is particularly useful for selecting all data documentation (#760).

  • New lacks_concepts() can select topics that do not contain any of a number of specified concepts. (@mikldk, #1232)

Home, authors, and citation

  • pkgdown now escapes html and linkifies links in comments in author info from DESCRIPTION (@maelle, #1204)

  • pkgdown now uses the ORCiD logo included in Font Awesome 5.11 instead of querying it from members.orcid.org (@bisaloo, #1153)

  • badges are now extracted from everything between <!--badges: start--> and <!--badges: end-->. They used to be extracted only if they were direct children of the first <p> after <!--badges: start-->.

  • build_home() now looks for pkgdown/index.md in addition to the top-level index or README files (@nteetor, #1031)

  • pkgdown now formats the package version displayed in the navbar the same way as it has been specified in the DESCRIPTION file. In particular, version separators (e.g. . and -) are preserved. (#1170, @kevinushey)

  • add support for navbar submenus: you can create submenus following the convention established in rstudio/rmarkdown#721 (@ijlyttle, @wendtke, #1213)

Other

  • Updated JS libraries: jquery 3.3.1 -> 3.4.1; bootswatch 3.3.7 -> 3.4.0; bootstrap 3.3.7 -> bootstrap 3.4.1; docsearch 2.6.1 -> 2.6.3 (@jayhesselberth).

  • Markdown conversion now explicitly allows markdown inside of HTML blocks; this was previously accidentally disabled (#1220).

  • A timestamp for the last site build is reported in pkgdown.yml (#1122).

pkgdown 1.4.1

CRAN release: 2019-09-14

  • Don’t install test package in user library (fixes CRAN failure).

pkgdown 1.4.0

CRAN release: 2019-09-03

New features

  • build citation as specified by the textVersion argument of citEntry in the CITATION file (#1096, @yiluheihei)

  • build_site(), build_reference() and build_home() gain a parameter devel which controls whether you’re in deployment or development mode. It generalises and replaces (with deprecation) the existing document argument.

    Development mode is optimised for rapid iteration and is the default for build_reference(). It uses pkgload::load_all() to load code directly from disk in order.

    Deployment mode is slower, but guarantees correct results, and is the default for build_site(). It installs the package into a temporary library, and runs examples/articles in a new process.

  • build_reference() no longer runs devtools::document() (#1079) and build_home() no longer re-builds README.Rmd or index.Rmd. This makes the scope of responsibility of pkgdown more clear: it now only creates/modifies files in doc/.

  • build_home() now strips quotes from Title and Description fields when generating page metadata. Additionally, you can now override the defaults via the title and description fields in the home section of _pkgdown.yml (#957, @maelle).

  • vignette("linking") describes how pkgdown’s automatic linking works, and how to ensure that cross-package links point to the right place.

Bug fixes and minor improvements

Rd translation

  • \examples{} rendering has been completely overhauled so it now first converts the entire mixed Rd-R block to R prior, and then evaluates the whole thing. This considerably improves the fidelity of the translation at a small cost of no longer being able to remove \donttest{} and friends (#1087).

  • \item{}s in \describe{} containing whitespace are translated correctly (#1117).

  • \dots and \ldots are translated to ... instead of the ellipsis, since they’re often found in code (#1114).

  • \tabular{} translation handles code better (@mitchelloharawild, #978).

  • \subsection{} contents are now treated as paragraphs, not inline text (#991).

  • \preformatted{} blocks preserve important whitespace (#951).

Front end

  • Links to online documentation for functions in code chunks are no longer displayed when printing (#1135, @bisaloo).

  • Updated fontawesome to v5.7.1. fontawesome 5 deprecated the fa prefix. If you have used custom icons in your navbar, you’ll should update them from (e.g.) fa fa-home to fas fa-home. Brands now have a separate prefix so fa fa-github becomes fab fa-github (#953).

  • The navbar is now automatically hidden with headroom.js.

  • The sticky behaviour of the navbar is now implemented in pure CSS instead of relying a the 3rd party javascript library (#1016, @bisaloo)

  • Favicons are now automatically built from a package logo (#949).

Linking

  • Infix operators (e.g., %in% and %*%) are now linked to their documentation (#1082).

  • Function names can now be included in headers without spurious auto-linking (#948).

  • Links to external documentation now point to rdrr.io (#998).

Other

  • News page recognises more version specifications (including the
    “(development version)” now used by usethis) (#980).

  • Subdirectories are supported for assets (#939, @ijlyttle).

  • A default 404 page (404.html) is built, unless a custom .github/404.md is provided (#947).

  • build_article() now uses the raw vignette title as page <title> and og:title (@maelle, #1037).

  • build_home() now looks for license files spelled either as LICENSE or LICENCE (#972).

  • build_home() can find badges in paragraph coming after the comment <!-- badges: start --> (#670, @gaborcsardi, @maelle).

  • build_home() will add a community section to the sidebar if there is either a code of conduct (.github/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md) or a contributing guide (.github/CONTRIBUTING.md) (#1044, @maelle).

  • build_reference() gains a topics argument which allows you to re-build only specified topics.

  • build_site(new_process = TRUE) gains a timeout, options(pkgdown.timeout = 10), that can be used to prevent stalled builds.

  • deploy_site_github(install = FALSE) makes it possible to opt out of installation.

  • dev_mode() now recognises 0.1.9000 as a development version of a package (this is an emerging standard we use for packages with backward incompatible changes) (#1101).

pkgdown 1.3.0

CRAN release: 2018-12-06

  • Restore accidentally deleted build_logo() function so that logos are once more copied to the website.

  • Fix to pkgdown.css so page header has correct amount of top margin.

  • content-home.html template is no longer used when the homepage is an .Rmd (Reverts #834. Fixes #927, #929)

  • deploy_site_github() now passes parameters to build_site() (@noamross, #922), and the documentation gives slightly better advice.

  • Correct off-by-one error in navbar highlighting javascript; now no navbar is highlighted if none match the current path (#911).

  • Tweaking of HTML table classes was fixed (@yonicd, #912)

  • Restore accidentally removed docsearch.css file.

pkgdown 1.2.0

CRAN release: 2018-11-20

New features

  • deploy_site_github() can be used from continuous integration systems (like travis) to automatically deploy your package website to GitHub Pages. See documentation for how to set up details (@jimhester).

  • build_favicon() creates high resolution favicons from the package logo, and saves them in pkgdown/. They are created using the https://realfavicongenerator.net/ API, and are better suited for modern web usage (e.g. retina display screens, desktop shortcuts, etc.). This also removes the dependency on the magick package, making automated deployment a little easier (@bisaloo, #883).

  • Users with limited internet connectivity can explicitly disable internet usage by pkgdown by setting options(pkgdown.internet = FALSE) (#774, #877).

Improvements to Rd translation

  • rd2html() is now exported to facilitate creation of translation reprexes.

  • \Sexpr{} conversion supports multiple arguments, eliminating x must be a string or a R connection errors when using \doi{} (#738).

  • \tabular{} conversion better handles empty cells (#780).

  • \usage{} now supports qualified functions eliminating
    Error in fun_info(x) : Unknown call: :: errors (#795).

  • Invalid tags now generate more informative errors (@BarkleyBG, #771, #891)

Front end

  • The default footer now displays the version of pkgdown used to build the site (#876).

  • All third party resources are now fetched from a single CDN and are give a SRI hash (@bisaloo, #893).

  • The navbar version now has class “version” so you can more easily control its display (#680).

  • The default css has been tweaked to ensure that icons are visible on all browsers (#852).

Bug fixes and minor improvements

Home page

  • Can now build sites for older packages that don’t have a Authors@R field (#727).

  • Remote urls ending in .md are no longer tweaked to end in .html (#763).

  • Bug report link is only shown if there’s a “BugReports” field (#855).

  • content-home.html template is now used when the homepage is an .Rmd (@goldingn, #787).

  • A link to the source inst/CITATION was added to the authors page (#714).

News

  • Uses stricter regular expression when linking to GitHub authors (#902).

Reference

  • Unexported functions and test helpers are no longer loaded (#789).

  • Selectors that do not match topics now generate a warning. If none of the specified selectors have a match, no topics are selected (#728).

Articles

  • The display depth of vignette tables of contents can be configured by setting toc: depth in _pkgdown.yml (#821):

    toc:
  depth: 2

Overall site

  • init_site() now creates a CNAME file if one doesn’t already exist and the site’s metadata includes a url field.

  • build_site() loses vestigal mathjax parameter. This didn’t appear to do anything and no one could remember why it existed (#785).

  • build_site() now uses colours even if new_process = TRUE (@jimhester).

pkgdown 1.1.0

CRAN release: 2018-06-02

New features

  • build_reference() and build_site() get new document argument. When TRUE, the default, will automatically run devtools::document() to ensure that your documentation is up to date.

  • build_site() gains a new_process argument, which defaults to TRUE. This will run pkgdown in a separate process, and is recommended practice because it improves reproducibility (#647).

  • Improved display for icons: icons must be 30px and stored in top-level icons/ directory. They are embedded in a separate column of reference index table, instead of being inside a comment (!) (#607).

Front end

  • Added a keyboard shortcut for searching. Press shift + / (?) to move focus to the search bar (#642).

  • The Algolia logo is correctly shown in the search results (#673).

  • Navbar active tab highlighting uses a superior approach (suggested by

    1. which should mean that the active page is correctly highlighted in all scenarios (#660).

  • pkgdown.js is better isolated so it should still work even if you load html widgets that import a different version of jquery (#655).

Improvements to Rd translation

  • vignette() calls that don’t link to existing vignettes silently fail to link instead of generating an uninformative error messages (#652). Automatic linking works for re-exported objects that are not functions (@gaborcsardi, #666).

  • Empty \section{}s are ignored (#656). Previously, empty sections caused error Error in rep(TRUE, length(x) - 1).

  • \Sexpr{} supports results=text, results=Rd and results=hide (#651).

  • \tabular{} no longer requires a terminal \cr (#664, #645).

Minor bug fixes and improvements

  • Add inst/pkgdown.yml as a possible site configuration file so that packages on CRAN can be built without needing the development version (#662).

  • Default navbar template now uses site title, not package name (the package name is the default title, so this will not affect most sites) (#654).

  • You can suppress indexing by search engines by setting noindex: true pkgdown.yml (#686)

    template:
  params:
    noindex: true

  • build_article() sets IN_PKGDOWN env var so in_pkgdown() works (#650).

  • build_home(): CITATION files with non-UTF-8 encodings (latin1) work correctly, instead of generating an error. For non-UTF-8 locales, ensure you have e.g. Encoding: latin1 in your DESCRIPTION; but best practice is to re-enode your CITATION file to UTF-8 (#689).

  • build_home(): Markdown files (e.g., CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md) stored in .github/ are copied and linked correctly (#682).

  • build_news(): Multi-page changelogs (generated from NEWS.md with news: one_page: false in _pkgdown.yml) are rendered correctly.

  • build_reference(): reference index shows infix functions (like %+%) as `%+%`, not `%+%`() on (#659).

pkgdown 1.0.0

CRAN release: 2018-05-03

  • Major refactoring of path handling. build_ functions no longer take path or depth arguments. Instead, set the destination directory at the top level of pkgdown.yml.

  • Similarly, build_news() no longer takes a one_page argument; this should now be specified in the _pkgdown.yml instead. See the documentation for an example.