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

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Boylan, Ross <Ross.Boylan at ucsf.edu>
>>>>>     on Fri, 15 Jul 2016 17:23:37 +0000 writes:

    > 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.

Emacs has been rendering graphics and pdf  for several years
now, and there are also several web browsing modes that we (ESS
maintainers) have considered using in the past.

But really I'm not interested so much in the potential ESS
problems, which *are* solvable and as Duncan says correctly are
not R problems.

Rather I did want to get back to the original issue of
facilitating and officially supporting links in both directions 
	     R (installed package) Help  <--> R (installed package) vignettes

which I think you also want to continue talking about:

    > 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