[Rd] Rd: pdf manual: package information not on first page

Thorn Thaler thothal at sbox.tugraz.at
Fri Jun 26 09:20:49 CEST 2009


Duncan Murdoch schrieb:
>> So my question is, if there is any possibility to get the package 
>> documentation on the first page?
> 
> That's where it is supposed to be.  Could you look for errors in the one 
> where it comes last?  If you can't spot anything, you could send me the 
> tar.gz version of it and I'll take a look.

Hmm, "R CMD check" works fine without any problems. Are there any 
further checks I could perform? As pointed out by another reader of this 
list, could it, however, be an alphabetical issue? The name of the 
package with the information correctly on the first page starts with an 
upper case letter, while the other one doesn't. If upper case letters 
are supposed to come before lower case letters in the ordering, all 
would make sense. It would not be what I would like to have though. ;)

While writing these lines I investigated this behaviour and added a 
documentation file for function 'AAA' to see where it will be printed in 
the manual for the package starting with an upper case letter. And as 
presumed it was put on the very first page. So I think that R internally 
orders all documentation files, in doing so all documentation files 
starting with an upper case take precedence over those starting with a 
lower case letter.

This behaviour is somehow odd, though, a workaround would be of course 
to rename the documentation file for the package as 
"00-<package-name>-package.Rd" to assure that it will come first in the 
manual.

Is this behaviour intentional or is it a bug?

Thorn



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