HTML vignettes crashing your RStudio? This may be the reason

Short version: if RStudio on Windows 7 crashes when viewing vignettes in HTML format, it may be because those packages specify knitr::rmarkdown as the vignette engine, instead of knitr::knitr.
Longer version with details – read on.

HTML documentation for broom in RStudioAt work I run RStudio (currently version 1.0.136) on Windows 7 (because I have no choice). This works:

open the Packages tab
click on broom
click on User guides, package vignettes and other documentation
click on HTML to see documentation for broom::broom

HTML documentation for dplyr in RStudioIf I do the same for the dplyr package and choose the HTML documentation for dplyr::two-table, the results is not so pleasing (see image, right). Click on Debug for an uninformative message:
an unhandled win 32 exception occurred in rstudio.exe [10276].
Looking at the RMD source for the vignettes, we see that dplyr specifies knitr::rmarkdown for the vignette engine, whereas broom specifies knitr::knitr.

# dplyr
---
title: "Two-table verbs"
date: "`r Sys.Date()`"
output: rmarkdown::html_vignette
vignette: >
%\VignetteIndexEntry{Two-table verbs}
%\VignetteEngine{knitr::rmarkdown}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
---

# broom
<!--
%\VignetteEngine{knitr::knitr}
%\VignetteIndexEntry{Introduction to broom}
-->

Some further investigation suggests that the crash occurs for all packages where %\VignetteEngine{knitr::rmarkdown}, but not for those where %\VignetteEngine{knit...

Source: What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate - March 6, 2017 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: nsaunders Tags: R statistics debug rstudio software windows Source Type: blogs