PDF does not open after being rendered (using Makefile) about oxforddown HOT 2 CLOSED

Hi, this is an issue due to how Windows represents directories paths.
While Operating Systems based on Unix (such as Linux and Max OS) uses the slash (/) to separate the parts of a path, Windows uses the backslash (\).

So, the file you want to open, in a Unix based OS is represented as docs/_main.pdf, while in Windows it is represented as docs\_main.pdf.

Given that in R \ is used as an escape character (for representing special characters like \n or \t), you have to write your path as docs\\_main.pdf. This way, \\ is used to represent the single backslash in the path.

I fixed this issue modifying the Makefile replacing Rscript -e 'browseURL("docs/_main.pdf")' at line 4 with Rscript -e 'browseURL(ifelse(.Platform[["OS.type"]] == "windows", "docs\\_main.pdf", "docs/_main.pdf"))'
On R, .Platform[["OS.type"]] will return "windows" if R is running on Windows and "unix" if R is running on Linux or Mac OS.

This is the whole Makefile with the fix on pdf, gitbook and word:

pdf:
	Rscript -e 'options(bookdown.render.file_scope = FALSE); bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", output_format = "bookdown::pdf_book")'
	rm -f *.log *.mtc* *.maf *.aux *.bcf *.lof *.lot *.out *.toc front-and-back-matter/abbreviations.aux
	Rscript -e 'browseURL(ifelse(.Platform[["OS.type"]] == "windows", "docs\\_main.pdf", "docs/_main.pdf"))'

gitbook:
	Rscript -e 'options(bookdown.render.file_scope = FALSE); bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", output_format = "bookdown::gitbook")'
	Rscript -e 'browseURL(ifelse(.Platform[["OS.type"]] == "windows", "docs\\index.html", "docs/index.html"))'

word:
	Rscript -e 'options(bookdown.render.file_scope = FALSE); bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", output_format = "bookdown::word_document2")'
	Rscript -e 'browseURL(ifelse(.Platform[["OS.type"]] == "windows", "docs\\_main.docx", "docs/_main.docx"))'

clean:
	rm -f *.log *.mtc* *.maf *.aux *.bbl *.blg *.xml
	
clean-knits:
	rm -f *.docx *.html *.pdf *.log *.maf *.mtc* *.tex *.toc *.out *.lof *.lot *.bcf *.aux
	rm -R *_files
	rm -R *_cache

from oxforddown.

Thanks for flagging this issue!

I've just pushed a fix - the Makefile now uses the here package to build the filepath, which should ensure cross-platform compatibility (I tested it on Mac OS and Windows 10).

Can you try downloading the latest version from GitHub and checking it it works?

from oxforddown.