Assist with downloading assets to use locally

[TimTaylor]

Would you consider a function that assist users in downloading the assets used by a litedown document, e.g. something like
download_assets().

Motivation:
I've a preference for embedding the css/js which generally works great but did bite me on CRAN recently (no internet / cdn access) so I have had to disable the embedding for my vignettes. The longer term solution for me will be to download the assets in to the vignette folder prior to submission. Asking here first before cooking something up for myself.

[yihui]

Done: https://yihui.org/litedown/#sec:offline

output:
  html:
    options:
      offline: true

However, it may not be worth using in your case. I did this mainly for people in restricted environments where they can't access external web resources for security reasons. I'm not sure what your motivation of embedding resources is, but personally I prefer using CDN resources so the HTML file is smaller in size and the local directory is cleaner. Note that if your document involves LaTeX math, downloading MathJax or KaTeX means also downloading all their fonts (each of MathJax and KaTeX has about 20 woff2 fonts and could clutter your source package).

You'd also have to specify the asset versions to make the offline option work reliably, e.g.,

css: ["@default@1.14.3"]

instead of

css: ["@default"]

because litedown will try to dynamically resolve the version to the latest version number. By the time CRAN checks your package, the latest version may have changed (hence pre-downloaded assets from older versions won't work).

[TimTaylor]

Done: https://yihui.org/litedown/#sec:offline

Thank you.

I'm not sure what your motivation of embedding resources is, but personally I prefer using CDN resources so the HTML file is smaller in size and the local directory is cleaner.

Yes, it is just a preference for me (but could change).

You'd also have to specify the asset versions to make the offline option work reliably, e.g.,

css: ["@default@1.14.3"]

instead of

css: ["@default"]

because litedown will try to dynamically resolve the version to the latest version number. By the time CRAN checks your package, the latest version may have changed (hence pre-downloaded assets from older versions won't work).

I need to digest this a little more and play around with litedown to understand. It differs a little to my mental model of how this would work so just need to spend some time thinking about it.

Cheers

[yihui]

I need to digest this a little more

No need to digest that any more. I just pushed a change so that the offline feature will ignore the asset version. As long as a version has been downloaded previously, it will be used regardless of whether it is the current latest version.

[TimTaylor]

⭐- thank you