[R] aggregated CHM help files

[John Aitchison]

On 1 Mar 2001, at 8:17, Prof Brian D Ripley wrote:

> On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, John Aitchison wrote:
> 
> (No HTML in mail, please.)
oops

 I believe it is only possible to do this statically, that is to link
> several .chm files into a single help set from a pre-specified set.
> But the set of help files for R is dynamic, depending which packages
> are available (and which versions of the packages).  We have enough toruble
> with cross-links between help files ....


well, my ignorance is profound in this as in so many other areas, but from 
my reading of the M$ docs it seems that the chm/html help file engine will 
ignore files that are not present, and that this is intended as a 
*feature* ie a way of distributing full and partial versions of the help 
file. So one could, in theory, specify a superset (all possible R chm 
files) and htmlhelp would look only at those actually present.
 

As to the dynamic nature of the set of help files for R a) see above and 
b) I had not intended that this be something implemented from or by "R 
central" .. I am not being disrespectful here, just suggesting that it 
might be possible to build such a thing (aggregated CHM help file) at the 
USER end (to reflect what they have chosen to download) with some utility 
prog .

I am willing to write that utility myself, but I don't want to do it if a) 
it has been done b) it would serve no useful purpose in the opinion of the 
R people c) if others can advise me that it is overly difficult .. as in, 
I am trying to force the htmlhelp engine to do something that it was not 
designed to do.

Let me add that I am very aware of the cross platform philosophy of R and 
that I recognize that platform-dependent full text indexing in this way is 
not perhaps the best way to go. There is, of course, the remarkable mg 
system as in "Managing Gigabytes" (Witten, Graham, Bell) which is afaik 
all C and could perhaps be considered as a better cross platform solution 
down the track.

Again, I'd like to re-iterate that when I raise an issue like this I am 
not requesting someone to DO something - I'm more than happy to contribute 
what I can,  but I don't want to reinvent the wheel. Just looking for some 
feedback and guidance.




John Aitchison
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