[R-pkg-devel] relation between vignettes and help files

Boylan, Ross Ross.Boylan at ucsf.edu
Fri Jul 15 19:23:37 CEST 2016


One issue with integrating vignettes into the help system is that vignettes are 
more likely to have material (figures, math) that renders poorly or not at all as text.
I also mostly use ESS on terminal rather than graphical interface, and so
like the  plain text version of things.  OTOH, I used Sweave specifically so
I could put math in the vignette.

Does anyone have any thoughts about the substantive division of info between help files and
vignettes?
Ross
________________________________________
From: Martin Maechler [maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch]
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2016 5:32 AM
To: Duncan Murdoch
Cc: Enrico Schumann; Boylan, Ross; r-package-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R-pkg-devel] relation between vignettes and help files

......
It is even worse, isn't it: Nowadays html help pages are (almost)
always created *dynamically* via R's help() or help.start();
For my setup of 1000s of packages in my libraries in .libPaths(),
generating all the html pages is too costly
[I think Rstudio is now smart and does this in the background
 for its *own* package data base ?? -- I wish we would enable to
 do this easily in base R !]

and I am using (ESS with) "text" help_type, and so these links
to the url in doc/html  would not work for me.

I wonder if we should not think harder about this, and provide a
portable solution.

I do agree that it should be very desirable to have links portably,
in *both* directions between
  our "reference manuals"  ( = the help pages)  and
  our "user's manuals"     ( = the vignettes ).

Martin



More information about the R-package-devel mailing list