Help in 2.10 lost its "Find" feature
On 11/11/2009 11:40 AM, hadley wickham wrote:
I understand that no one wanted to maintain the old Help, but one feature I used extensively -- as a newbie to R or to an unfamiliar package -- was the capability of searching for a word or phrase on the Help page itself. Ctrl-F/Command-F (Windows/mac) 'differently-phrased-capability' was a fast way to find out how to specify the arguments for a function call to accommodate a "capability" phrased differently than could be found in the author's designed argument list, especially for long and informative Help's. If new-Help could easily be enhanced to resurrect that feature, I believe many users would appreciate it. Thanks.
Most browsers offer this feature - it certainly works in safari and firefox, and I'm sure in internet explorer too.
I think Daniel was talking about the full text search of all pages. This index for this was built by the Microsoft Help Compiler so it was available in CHM help; the Mac has the full text search available in lots of places, so it worked there just because the system automatically indexed the static HTML pages. I think it would be nice to get this back and make it less platform specific. It would need indexing of the content of the pages, and Javascript or similar to access the indices. Duncan Murdoch