[R] including figures in html documentation/help

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11-07-06 8:47 AM, Jannis wrote:
> Dear list members,
>
> is it somehow possible to include figures to the html help pages of individueal functions (containing for example a plot produced by that function?)
>
> I thought about adding these figures into a 'graphs' subfolder of the package folder and then to somehow insert some sort of html link into the documentation code.
>
> I use inlinedocs for creating the documentation.

Not in the current release, but this feature has been added to R-devel 
(which will be released at the end of October).

The simplest form is to put

\figure{filename.png}

into your help page.  The "filename.png" file should be stored in the 
man/figures directory of your package.

You can also generate figures using R code, but it's a little tricky to 
make sure the generated files are stored in the right place.  Here's an 
ugly example, which will probably be simpler by release time:

\Sexpr[stage=render,results=rd]{
      library(testpkg)  # This is the package with the example
      library(grDevices)
      filename <- tempfile(fileext=".png")
      png(file=filename)
      plot(rnorm(100))
      dev.off()
      paste("\\\\ifelse{html}{\\\\figure{", 
file.path("../../../session", basename(filename)),
            "}}{\\\\figure{", normalizePath(filename, "/"), "}}", sep="")
}


Documentation on this is currently sparse, but it's there.

Duncan Murdoch