Great Docs for R?

[jhelvy]

I've only just learned about Great Docs, but already I can tell there are some really great design choices here. First, it seems it's built on top of Quarto, which makes SO much sense. I also have used Quarto for the docs site for our R package, surveydown. I found the pkgdown site just isn't rich enough for a project like surveydown - Quarto just offers so much more. This project looks like the closest thing I've seen to what we built for our project using Quarto. So, a natural question is if there is any interest in developing a similar GD4R?

[rich-iannone]

I have some good news as we are (slowly) moving in the direction of supporting other languages, or, multiple languages in the same site. Certainly, there's going to be a lot of work to do in getting it going, but these efforts will definitely include R! And there are different documentation scenarios we want to support like CLI-only Go or Rust libraries, combined R/Python docs sites (whether or not the packages live in the same repo or not), etc. (We have an early writeup of these plans in https://posit-dev.github.io/great-docs/roadmap.html#multi-language-api-documentation-python-r-rust-js; though it is somewhat vague about an R-only docs scenario.)

So, instead of building a separate GD4R package, the hope is to do it all in Great Docs. The plan (insofar as we have a plan right now) is to consume output from each language's documentation toolchain (so, roxygen2/pkgdown for R, rustdoc for Rust, TypeDoc for JS, etc.) and normalize it into a common representation that Great Docs can then renders (with consistent styling).