[Rd] HTML vignette browser

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On 6/4/07, Seth Falcon <sfalcon at fhcrc.org> wrote:
> Friedrich Leisch <friedrich.leisch at stat.uni-muenchen.de> writes:
> > Looks good to me, and certainly something worth being added to R.
> >
> > 2 quick (related) comments:
> >
> > 1) I am not sure if we want to include links to the Latex-Sources by
> >    default, those might confuse unsuspecting novices a lot. Perhaps
> >    make those optional using an argument to browseVignettes(), which
> >    is FALSE by default?
>
> I agree that the Rnw could confuse folks.  But I'm not sure it needs
> to be hidden or turned off by default...  If the .R file was also
> included then it would be less confusing I suspect as the curious
> could deduce what Rnw is about by triangulation.
>
> > 2) Instead links to .Rnw files we may want to include links to the R
> >    code -> should we R CMD INSTALL a tangled version of each vignette
> >    such that we can link to it? Of course it is redundant information
> >    given the .Rnw, but we also have the help pages in several formats
> >    ready.
>
> Including, by default, links to the tangled .R code seems like a
> really nice idea.  I think a lot of users who find vignettes don't
> realize that all of the code used to generate the entire document is
> available to them -- I just had a question from someone who wanted to
> know how to make a plot that appeared in a vignette, for example.

I agree that having a Stangled .R file would be a great idea (among
other things, it would have the complete code, which many PDFs will
not).

I don't have a strong opinion either way about linking to the .Rnw
file. It should definitely be there if the PDF file is absent (e.g.
for grid, and other packages installed with --no-vignettes, which I
always do for local installation). Maybe we can keep them, but change
the name to something more scary than "source", e.g. "LaTeX/Noweb
source".

-Deepayan