[R] help uses only netscape?

[Thomas Lumley]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Jeff D. Hamann wrote:

> > I don't have netscape installed on my machine (FreeBSD 4.4) and when I
> type
> > the command help.start(), I get
> >
> > > netscape: not found
> >
> > error. I do have mozilla installed. Is this a defect? can I run any web
> > browser?

To paraphrase Henry Ford, you can run any browser as long as it's
netscape (at the moment).

The difficulty is that R needs to be able to tell the browser to load a
new page (rather than starting a new instance with that new page) when you
ask for help on a topic.  Most browsers don't allow this. Apparently
recent Mozillas do, and it's possible that Konqueror may have a way to do
this, but we don't really know how.

It does need fixing, at it would be Really Nice if someone were to work
out how to support more browsers.

If you just want to browse through the help yourself, rather than
directing help() output to the browser, you can point any browser at
    $R_HOME/doc/index.html

	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Asst. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle

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