[R] preformatted and '#' in manual pages

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 9/29/2009 11:57 AM, Gábor Csárdi wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 5:36 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>> Gábor Csárdi wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear All,
>>>
>>> I have the following in a .Rd file:
>>> ...
>>>      human readable (not binary) format. The format itself is like
>>>      the following:
>>>      \preformatted{
>>>        \# vertex1name
>>>        vertex2name [optionalWeight]
>>>        vertex3name [optionalWeight]
>>>      }
>>>      Here, the first vertex of an edge is preceded with a pound sign
>>> ...
>>>
>>> and it is fine with R 2.9.2, but fails on R-devel, when building the
>>> PDF version of the manual:
>>> ...
>>> * checking PDF version of manual ... WARNING
>>> LaTeX errors when creating PDF version.
>>> This typically indicates Rd problems.
>>> LaTeX errors found:
>>> ! You can't use `macro parameter character #' in vertical mode.
>>> <argument> ...ike the following: \begin {alltt} ##
>>>                                                   vertex1name vertex2name
>>> [...
>>> l.9051 listed one per line on subsequent lines.}
>>>
>>> * checking PDF version of manual without index ... ERROR
>>>
>>> To be precise, this is
>>> * using R version 2.10.0 Under development (unstable) (2009-09-27 r49847)
>>>
>>> Is there a way to escape the '#' for LaTeX?
>>
>> I believe the Latex macro you want is \sharp, which isnt an Rd macro, so
>> you'd need something like
>> \latex{\sharp}{#}.
> 
> Duncan,
> 
> this might solve the issue in Latex (I haven't tried yet), but in R
> (version 2.9.2) the manual page looks like
> ...
>         is like the following:
> 
>                 \latex{\sharp}{#} vertex1name
>                 vertex2name [optionalWeight]
>                 vertex3name [optionalWeight]
> 
>         Here, the first vertex of an edge is preceded with a pound sign
> ...
> 
> which is obviously not what I want.


I guess that's still in the \preformatted section, which doesn't act on 
Rd macros.  Sorry about that, my advice assumed you were putting it into 
text.

Did 2.9.x emit the \sharp in this situation, or did it do something 
else?  We do some rewriting of special characters when writing verbatim 
text, and it looks as though our handling of # has changed.  (I'm just 
heading out to a long meeting, or I'd check myself...)

Duncan Murdoch