[Rd] R 2.10 and help

[Simon Urbanek]

On May 26, 2010, at 4:51 PM, Jamie Love wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I've been developing a little project for the past few months on R2.9.
> The project utilises RServe to access R over at tcp/ip connection.
> 
> One feature of the project is to take R-Help and display it to the
> user through my own UI. In 2.9 this worked well as all the html help
> was pre-generated - I could ask R to find the help (e.g. help(plot)
> would return the rd file), and then I could look up the .html file
> from that.
> 
> In R 2.10 things changed dramatically for help, and now html help is
> generated when requested from the rd files.
> 
> I've tried various ways to access the help as HTML since then, but
> I've had no luck. I was wondering if anyone would be able to suggest
> an approach where I could run 'help(plot)', and then take the
> resulting .rd file and generate the necessary html help from it.
> 

It's much more simple since 2.10 as you can simply use the URL (same URL as the help system uses). For examples see JGR or the Mac GUI. Or you can do the same thing that the Rhttpd server does  actually generating the html - see tools:::httpd 

Cheers,
Simon