[R] aggregated CHM help files

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, John Aitchison wrote:

>
>
> 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.

Even `all possible R chm files' is a dynamic set, but I was not aware
of the feature you mention.

> 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 .

And I was just giving feedback (as asked for) about what I thought the
snag was.  I did once look at this possibility, back in the days when I
had more enthusiasm for the Windows platform and R port.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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