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

[Tom Wainwright]

>From a user perspective, I think a distinction needs to be made between
three things: help files, demos, and vignettes. I expect the help file for
functions to explain the API and (briefly) the methods implemented (with
references) and to have a few terse but useful examples in the Examples
section that can at least help a user understand the basic calls and main
options. Vignettes and demos are aimed more at the package rather than
function level; personally, I find vignettes more useful than demos.
Vignettes should provide more extensive use-case instances with explanation
of how and why the package might be applied. Demos tend to provide more
extensive sets of examples; I use them mostly for complicated graphics
(images, plotmath, etc.) where I can scan through a set of demos and find
some code that is close to what I want.

As far as linking from help to vignettes, for CRAN packages all the
vignettes appear on the web, and I would think it would be easy and
reliable to include html links to the vignettes on CRAN (assuming CRAN
doesn't mess about with web file hierarchies). This has a couple minor
issues I can think of: It won't help those working without internet access,
and it would link to vignettes for the current package version, not the
installed version. I suspect those problems are rare, and in those cases
users can poke around in the install directories to find what they need.
The reverse linking (vignettes to help) won't really work that way, as the
Reference Manuals on CRAN are in single PDF files not indexed by function,
but anyone clever enough to work through a vignette in R should already
know how to find their local help pages.

 Tom

On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 10:23 AM, Boylan, Ross <Ross.Boylan at ucsf.edu> wrote:

> 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
>
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