[Rd] Links to non-vignette documentation

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> On 2/23/2006 11:53 AM, hadley wickham wrote:
>> Section 1.4 of Writing R Extensions says:
>>
>> In addition to the help files in Rd format, R packages allow the
>> inclusion of documents in arbitrary other formats. The standard
>> location for these is subdirectory inst/doc of a source package, the
>> contents will be copied to subdirectory doc when the package is
>> installed. Pointers from package help indices to the installed
>> documents are automatically created. Documents in inst/doc can be in
>> arbitrary format, however we strongly recommend to provide them in PDF
>> format, such that users on all platforms can easily read them.
>>
>> Where are these pointers created?  I have a package with a pdf file
>> (introduction.pdf) in inst/doc but I can't find a link to it from the
>> documentation (eg. from help.start() or help(package=...)
>>
>> Is there anyway to have my pdf documentation listed under vignettes
>> other than making it a sweave file?

No, a vignette is regarded as an Sweave file.

> A manually written inst/doc/index.html file will be linked into the help
> system.

.install_package_vignette_index does create an index, and info does get 
put on the packages html page.

I just tried this by adding inst/doc/foo.pdf to windlgs.  If there is an 
pdf file but no .[RS]nw vignettes, the index is fairly useless but 
browsing is available.

> I don't know if the sentence about pointers being created is true otherwise.

It seems to be.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595