Navigation is not working in the preview of a book

[rstudio]

Navigation is not working in the preview of a book

[yihui]

That is odd. What is your version of RStudio and operating system?

[FvD]

Ubuntu 14.04 with RStudio 0.99.878.

[yihui]

I cannot reproduce it with the current release of RStudio 0.99.892 on Ubuntu 15.04: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/

[FvD]

The issue persists after updating to RSTudio 0.99.892. I installed knitr from you github repo so that the version is 1.12.21 to solve some initial issues I had rendering the bookdown example in the inst folder. servr is at version 0.3.

To try to narrow the issue down I reduced the example in the inst folder to a minimal template and I can reproduce the issue with that smaller file-set. Perhaps I should update all your packages to the yihui-XRAN repo.

[yihui]

I don't think this is relevant to knitr, because you said even servr::httd() for static HTML files had the same problem.

The possible reason is that your Ubuntu system does not recognize the MIME type of .html files. You may run the system command mimetype on any HTML file to see the output, or servr:::guess_type() on an HTML file. The expected output is text/html, and you system might give application/octet-stream.

[FvD]

Yes, that is probably it!

 > servr:::guess_type("index.html")
 [1] "application/x-extension-html"

It appears to be an oddity introduced by installing firefox. Looking at /etc/mimetypes, everything seems to be in order:

~ ❯❯❯ grep html /etc/mime.types  
     [...]
     text/html                  html htm shtml

But in .local/share/applications

~/.l/s/applications ❯❯❯ ag "x-extension-html"
mimeapps.list
    25:application/x-extension-html=firefox.desktop
    66:application/x-extension-html=firefox.desktop;

I've never run into this before, so I will have a look how to change that.

[yihui]

Do you know how to modify MIME types? If not, you may look at this article: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AddingMimeTypes It is odd anyway; application/x-extension-html should not be the default MIME type for .html files on Ubuntu.

[FvD]

Yes, it was in fact the mime type that was causing the issue. I am not sure which application made the change, but suspect it was Firefox at some point.

To change the mime type for html files back to the text/html default these were the steps I had to take. Remove the x-extension-html.xml and user-extension-html.xml files from the ~./local/share/mime folder and then rebuild the mime type database. In the steps below I do not delete the files, but copy them to the desktop.

mv ./local/share/mime/application/x-extension-html.xml ~/Desktop
mv ./local/share/mime/packages/user-extension-html.xml ~/Desktop

update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime

Then log-out and log in again. The mimetype is now correct and the bookdown preview works as expected.

[github-actions]

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