[Rd] Viewing pdfs from inst/doc

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 10:44 PM, rudjer<rkoenker at uiuc.edu> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> My question is easily How?  The function vignette() provides a convenient
> way to read properly Sweaved
> vignettes, but what about plain old pdfs that someone like me would like to
> stick into inst/doc and
> then view?  It seems possible to make a modified vignette function to do
> this using print.vignette,
> but having started down this road, I got the strong sensation of reinventing
> the wheel and the
> inevitably related sensation that I wasn't going to know what to call my new
> wheel when it was
> created.  I recognize that the current setup is supposed to encourage proper
> vignettes, but sometimes
> courage fails.
>
> A related questions is whether there is a convenient substitute for a
> package specific function like this:
>    FAQ <- function (pkg = "quantreg")
>          file.show(file.path(system.file(package = pkg), "FAQ"))
>
> to read the faq that I've written for the package and placed in the inst/
> directory.

 I think I tried to do this a little while ago, and trawling R-help
and R-dev came up with the suggestion of putting something in a demo
section. Hence I have foo/demo/bar.R which is:

pdf = system.file("doc/bar.pdf",package="foo")

if (.Platform$OS.type == "windows") {
  shell.exec(pdf)
}else{
  system(paste(shQuote(getOption("pdfviewer")), shQuote(pdf)),
            wait = FALSE)
}

 Then when a user does demo(bar) the PDF pops up. I document this in
the Rd doc for bar.

 It does seem a bit kludgy, and maybe there's a need for a package to
handle all this...

Barry