[Rd] Link to pdf documentation from other package ?

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> On 11/24/2009 8:20 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 8:29 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>
>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> you could use the Sweave like macro to compute the path inside the Rd
>>>> environments
>>>>
>>>> \Sexpr{file.path(system.file(package="AlgDesign", "doc"),
>>>> "AlgDesign.pdf")}
>>>>
>>>> described in 'Writing R extensions' 2.11
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> <http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/doc/manual/R-exts.html#Dynamic-pages>
>>>
>>>
>>> That won't work with dynamic help. (It surprised me, too.)  You can't
>>> link
>>> to the file system from within the dynamic help pages.  You can't link to
>>> a
>>> file:// link, which is what you'd need to get that to work.
>>>
>>> This is a browser restriction, for security reasons.  You don't want
>>
>> I am able to read files from my file system from the browser.  For
>> example enter this into the Windows command line:
>>
>> echo some dummy text > dummy.html
>> echo "<a href=dummy.html>dummy</a>" > test-read-file.html
>> test-read-file.html
>>
>> and click on dummy when the contents of test-read-file.html appears in
>> the browser.
>>
>> For me, it causes the contents of the dummy.html file to appear in the
>> browser.  I am on Windows Vista and I tried it in IE8, Firefox 3.5.5
>> and Chrome 3.0 and it worked in all three.
>
> The rule in most browsers is that pages retrieved via http:// links can't
> link to file:// links.  Presumably your local file was already a file://
> link.

But the help files are local.  It would seem that this problem would
be addressed if the help files were not displayed using http://