[R-SIG-Mac] R.app Help window problem with mouse click on PDF

[Steven McKinney]

Hi Simon,


Thanks for the diagnosis.  It certainly
is not worth a bunch of work to integrate 
Adobe Reader into the mix.

I have a plug-in for Firefox (Manfred Schubert's 
PDF plugin) that loads PDFs, so I don't have to 
deal with AR there.  Can something similar be done for
the R help browser?  Is there some setting 
I can tweak to stop the R browser from 
invoking AR, or stop the OS from invoking AR
for R's browser?  (Not sure how all this works under
the hood.)


Cheers

Steve





-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Urbanek [mailto:simon.urbanek at r-project.org]
Sent: Fri 10/13/2006 12:59 PM
To: Jörg Beyer
Cc: Steven McKinney; r-sig-mac at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [R-SIG-Mac]  R.app Help window problem with mouse click on PDF
 
On Oct 13, 2006, at 6:41 AM, Jörg Beyer wrote:

> I can confirm this problem for
>   Mac OS X 10.4.6
>   R 2.2.1
>   Adobe Reader 7.0.8
>
> (I searched the help files and found some valid pdf-links to test  
> -- the one
> you mentioned is not part of R 2.2.1.)
>
> It would be interesting to see if this behavior is related to a  
> specific Adobe Reader version. Anyone?
>

I can only add that it works as advertised (i.e. the pdf is displayed  
inside the window) *without* AR. Please note that AR does screw up  
the OS a lot and it is quite tedious to restore it (if possible at  
all). I'm not quite willing to mess up my system with AR as I intend  
to work on that machine, so if anyone can shed some light as of what  
exactly AR breaks there, it would be nice. My guess would be that  
removing the AR plugin should restore the correct behavior  
(untested). Note that Adobe's un-installer doesn't uninstall the  
plugin and effectively breaks PDF bindings.

Cheers,
Simon


>
>> Apple Mac OS X 10.4.8
>> R.app Version 2.4.0 GUI 1.17 (3868)
>>
>>
>> If I invoke a help window containing a URL to a PDF,
>> and I click on the hyperlink to the PDF, I get a
>> "Choose application" dialog window.  After dismissing
>> the window, the R help window disappears and I see
>> the following error output in the R.app GUI command line
>> window (see below).
>>
>> Anyone else noticing this behaviour?
>>
>> Reproduce:
>> Start R.app
>> Enter help command
>>> help("Methods", package = "methods")
>>
>> Click on the PDF hyperlink at the bottom of the help page
>>
>>   http://developer.r-project.org/howMethodsWork.pdf
>>
>>
>> (The hyperlink does work when I copy and paste it to a
>>  browser.)
>>
>> If I then reinvoke help
>>> help("Methods", package = "methods")
>> and click on the hyperlink, the help window goes
>> blank but no "Choose Application" dialog appears,
>> no error message in the console.
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> Joerg Beyer
> PHILIPPS-University Marburg
> Dept. of Psychology
>
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