neurosurf

neurosurf is an R package for reading, manipulating, and visualizing surface-based neuroimaging data represented as triangle meshes. It focuses on surface geometry, vertex-wise data, smoothing, geodesic neighborhoods, and both static and interactive rendering workflows.

The package is under active development.

Installation

Install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("bbuchsbaum/neurosurf")

Start here

The pkgdown site includes a few good entry points:

• Introduction to NeuroSurf Data Structures
• Displaying Surfaces with RGL
• Interactive Surface Visualization with surfwidget
• Surfplot-style Figures with neurosurf
• Reference index

Development setup

neurosurf includes an interactive 3D visualization component powered by surfviewjs. The built UMD bundle is committed so devtools::install_github() works without Node; Node is only needed if you want to rebuild the JavaScript library locally.

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v14 or higher)
• npm

Building surfviewjs

# Build the surfviewjs library and copy it into neurosurf
make surfview

# Check build status
make status

# Clean build artifacts
make clean-surfview

The Makefile will:

1. Install npm dependencies in surfviewjs if needed
2. Build the library with Vite
3. Copy the UMD bundle to inst/htmlwidgets/lib/neurosurface/
4. Synchronize the version number into surfwidget.yaml

Workflow integration

# Before R CMD check
make r-check

# Install package
make r-install

# Watch for changes during development
make watch-surfview  # Requires fswatch

Version management

The version number in surfwidget.yaml is synchronized with surfviewjs/package.json when make surfview runs. To update it manually:

make update-yaml
make show-version

Albers theme

This package uses the albersdown theme. Existing vignette theme hooks are replaced so albers.css and local albers.js render consistently on CRAN and GitHub Pages. The defaults are configured via params$family and params$preset (family = 'teal', preset = 'homage'). The pkgdown site uses template: { package: albersdown }.