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

[Boylan, Ross]

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