[Rd] RFC: Offline help

[Prof Brian Ripley]

I had not used offline help for many years, and when I tried to yesterday 
I found a number of issues (the most important of which is that I couldn't 
have R_DVIPSCMD="dvips -Pbdr" to send output to my office printer: the 
lack of error reporting is also problematic, and hid the fact that I don't 
have a default printer set for lpr, so unadorned 'dvips' does not work).

I've patched up the issues I found, but wondered if anyone was indeed 
making frequent use of offline help?  Two other things I am aware of is 
that there is no documentation on how to use it with MiKTeX on Windows 
(although it is possible), and that on Unix-alikes it is basically tied to 
Postscript printing (and PDF printing would be preferred in a number of 
setups).

If it is meeting a need we should keep it, but it seems to me that it 
should either be phased out (two less things to maintain, as there are two 
versions) or rewritten to be much more flexible (perhaps most simply by 
allowing a user-supplied R function to handle processing the .tex file, 
with utils::texi2dvi being a good start).

-- 
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