Installing Slidify on a Windows Machine

I’ve been wanting to try out the amazing Slidify package developed by Ramnath Vaidyanathan for a while. What it does is generate html slide shows directly from R, using R markdown. Turns out it was the perfect entertainment for someone down with a flu on a very hot summer weekend.

I followed the instructions described here, but ran into a few problems. Google-fu only gave me one closed discussion thread with someone else having the same problem, which was solved by upadting to R 2.15.2.

Since I was already on R 2.15.2, that wasn’t much help. But, as Ramnath mentioned in that thread, it’s mostly a problem with install_github, and building it from source worked for me. So, if you have never built an R package from source (like I didn’t), this post will hopefully save you a few hours.

Step 0: My session info, just for reference

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.15.2 (2012-10-26)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] devtools_1.1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] digest_0.6.0    evaluate_0.4.2  httr_0.2        memoise_0.1     parallel_2.15.2 plyr_1.7.1     
[7] RCurl_1.95-3    stringr_0.6.1   tools_2.15.2    whisker_0.1 

Library path is C:/Users/Thiago Silva/Documents/R/win-library/2.15

Step 1: Download and install Rtools

I grabbed it from here, Version 3.0, ran the executable, no hassle.

Step 2: Install devtools

At the R command prompt:

install.packages('devtools')

No hassle either.

Step 3: Install slidify from Github, using devtools

As suggested on Ramnath’s page, all smooth.

install_github("slidify", "ramnathv")

Step 4: Install slidifyLibraries

This is where the problems began. Using the recommended install_github method gave me the following error:

> install_github("slidifyLibraries", "ramnathv")
Installing github repo(s) slidifyLibraries/master from ramnathv
Installing slidifyLibraries.zip from https://github.com/ramnathv/slidifyLibraries/archive/master.zip
Installing slidifyLibraries
"C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-215~1.2/bin/x64/R" --vanilla CMD build "C:\Users\Thiago  \
  Silva\AppData\Local\Temp\Rtmp8esQJH\slidifyLibraries-master" --no-manual --no-resave-data 

* checking for file 'C:\Users\Thiago Silva\AppData\Local\Temp\Rtmp8esQJH\slidifyLibraries-master/DESCRIPTION' ... OK
* preparing 'slidifyLibraries':
* checking DESCRIPTION meta-information ... OK
* checking for LF line-endings in source and make files
* checking for empty or unneeded directories
* building 'slidifyLibraries_0.1.tar.gz'

Warning in utils::tar(filepath, pkgname, compression = "gzip", compression_level = 9,  :
  storing paths of more than 100 bytes is not portable:
  'slidifyLibraries/inst/libraries/frameworks/landslide/themes/machinalis/fonts/OFLGoudyStMTT-Italic.ttf'

(I got a lot of these warnings, only showing first and last)

Warning in utils::tar(filepath, pkgname, compression = "gzip", compression_level = 9,  :
  storing paths of more than 100 bytes is not portable:
  'slidifyLibraries/inst/libraries/widgets/mathjax/jax/output/SVG/fonts/TeX/Typewriter/Regular/CombDiacritMarks.js'

"C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-215~1.2/bin/x64/R" --vanilla CMD INSTALL  \
  "C:\Users\THIAGO~1\AppData\Local\Temp\Rtmp8esQJH/slidifyLibraries_0.1.tar.gz"  \
  --library="C:/Users/Thiago Silva/Documents/R/win-library/2.15" --with-keep.source 

Warning in max(which(block[1:100] > 0)) :
  no non-missing arguments to max; returning -Inf
Warning in rawToChar(block[seq_len(ns)]) : NAs introduced by coercion
Error in seq_len(ns) : argument must be coercible to non-negative integer


Error: Command failed (1)

Step 5) Install slidifyLibraries from Windows command prompt

Since the above didn’t work, I took matters in my own hands. First, I built the package from source using devtools. I downloaded it from Ramnath’s repository as a Zip file, then extracted it and removed the “-Master” from the main folder name (no idea if renaming matters or not, to be honest).

build("C:/Users/Thiago Silva/Downloads/slidifyLibraries/", binary=FALSE)

This gave me a file named “slidifyLibraries_0.1.tar.gz”. Once I had it, I opened a command prompt window, navigated to the folder where the file was, and typed:

R CMD INSTALL slidifyLibraries -l "C:\Users\Thiago Silva\Documents\R\win-library\2.15"

Don’t forget to change the path to your own R library path! The following happened:

R CMD INSTALL slidifyLibraries -l "C:\Users\Thiago Silva\Documents\R\win-library\2.15"

* installing *source* package 'slidifyLibraries' ...
** R
** inst
** preparing package for lazy loading
** help
*** installing help indices
** building package indices
** testing if installed package can be loaded
*** arch - i386
*** arch - x64

* DONE (slidifyLibraries)

And, voilá, it worked (for me). I now have my first slidify presentation. Success!

P.S.- If your Dropbox path is different from the standard installation (mine is), publish() will throw an error:

> publish('testdeck3', host = 'dropbox')
Creating slide directory at ~/Dropbox/Public/testdeck3
Copying files to ~/Dropbox/Public/testdeck3
[1] FALSE
Warning messages:
1: In file.copy(".", drop_dir, overwrite = F, recursive = TRUE) :
'recursive' will be ignored as 'to' is not a single existing directory
2: In file.create(to[okay]) :
cannot create file '~/Dropbox/Public/testdeck3', reason 'No such file or directory'

I fixed by creating a symbolic link to the actual Dropbox folder, inside my Documents folder, following these instructions (command-prompt option).