[R] help uses only netscape?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2001, Thomas Lumley wrote:

> 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).

Not really.  The current ?help.start in R-devel says

     The `browser' needs to work with a `"-remote openURL(...)"' call.
     Then, the hypertext R help interface is opened in any already
     running browser or a new one if necessary.  Browsers that support
     this interface include Netscape 4.x, 6.2 (but not 6.0/1), Opera 5
     and Mozilla 0.9.5.

Note that not even `netscape' suffices (and some versions of 4.7 fail
too).

> 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.

(On Unix-like operating systems, that is.)

> 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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-- 
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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