R Bookdown The GitBook toolbar not visibile in IE11 in Minimal Book Example

Question

A strange thing is happening browsing a A Minimal Book Example with Chrome and Edge shows the GitBook toolbar. However when using internet Explorer 11 with windows 10 the toolbar doesn't show but is working.

Versie: 11.98.16299.0
Updateversies: 11.0.48 (1<84047206)

Initially I thought this is a browser problem till I visited bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown and the toolbar was showing using the same IE11 browser.

I expect it is in the _output.yml but can find it, the location f the css could be the root cause.

bookdown::gitbook:  
  highlight: default    
  css: css/style.css  
  config:  
    toc:  
    collapse: section  
    download: null  
    toolbar:  
    position: fixed  
    search: yes  
    sharing:  
      facebook: no  
      twitter: no  
      google: no  
      weibo: no  
      instapper: no  
      vk: no  
      all: []   

Repartee

The two books are referering to two different .css style sheets, the first is bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown-demo/libs/gitbook-2.6.7/css/… and it is not working, the second is bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/libs/gitbook/css/style.css. For some reasons beyond my understanding, the .btn css style is not applied to the minimal book. – Airdry

Thanks Cedric, indeed by using the IE developer tools (F12). it shows a different structure. I tried to update all my packages but that didn't help. – Repartee

How are you building your book? I'm experiencing this, regardless of browser, when alternating between the popup on build book in the editor and separately opening the .html. It seems I'm getting a different source from localhost (127.0.0.1:36950/?view=rmarkdown) compared to the file output. – Ton

@Kevin, I've tried and reproduced exactly the same problem, only with ie11, using minimal example and bookdown demo. They show fine on chrome. As indicated by Floris the link to the internet file bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown works well in ie11. – Airdry

Answer 1

Just found that from the Bookdown site https://bookdown.org/ some links work and some don't (see animated gifs at the end)

• Working: https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/
• Failing: https://bookdown.org/rdpeng/rprogdatascience/

• Failing: http://r4ds.had.co.nz/

As the former was generated more recently it might be that the problem was fixed or that the web hosting/domain names are interfering.

TestCase
Just tried to replicate the issue using an existing repo of Jenny Bryan jennybc/happy-git-with-r which is available on GitHub and does seem to work in all browsers happy git with R

I cloned her GitHub repository on built the site and browsed locally the file: file:///C:/Users/Floris/Documents/happy-git-with-r/_book/index.html:

• IE11 - DOENS'T WORK
• EDGE - DOENS'T WORK
• CHROME - DOES WORK

Next I published the book on the web using a commercial web hosting account and a own domain name http://book.smart-r.net/

• IE11 - DOES WORK
• EDGE - DOES WORK

• CHROME - DOES WORK

still don't have the Root Cause but happy that is seems to work now.

R version 3.4.3 (2017-11-30) Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit) Running under: Windows >= 8 x64 (build 9200)

Matrix products: default

locale: 1 LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_CTYPE=English_United Kingdom.1252
3 LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C
5 LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252

attached base packages: 1 stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base

other attached packages: 1 bookdown_0.6

loaded via a namespace (and not attached): 1 compiler_3.4.3 backports_1.1.2 magrittr_1.5 rsconnect_0.8.5 rprojroot_1.3-2 htmltools_0.3.6 7 tools_3.4.3 yaml_2.1.16 Rcpp_0.12.15 stringi_1.1.6 rmarkdown_1.8 knitr_1.18
13 xfun_0.1 stringr_1.2.0 digest_0.6.14 evaluate_0.10.1

Repartee

Answer 2

Today we found that the Bookdown version 0.6 repaired this issue

Building the site with 0.5 still had the missing icons in IE11 after a package update to 0.6 it was resolved (currently even 0.7 is available and working fine)

Repartee