Warning: missing text for item ... in \describe?

G'day Spencer,

On Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:31:54 -0800
Spencer Graves <spencer.graves at pdf.com> wrote:

Hello:

      What might be the problem generating messages like "Warning:
missing text for item ... in \describe" with "R CMD check" and "R CMD
install"?

      With the current version of "fda" on R-Forge, I get the
following:

Warning: missing text for item 'fd' in \describe
Warning: missing text for item 'fdPar' in \describe
fRegress.Rd, which contains

\item{fd} { ...
\item{fdPar} {...

Apparently the space between the closing and the opening bracket leads
to some confusion; remove the space and the warning goes away.

I am not sure why an extra space here leads to problems, would be nicer
if it would not.  If it have to lead to a problem, then it would be
nice if the name of the .Rd files that produces the problem is actually
mentioned. :)
Well, the warning/errors always come out just before the file with the 
problem (unless you have stdout buffered and stderr not).  So finding 
which file does not seem so hard.

This *is* an error: nothing in the description allows whitespace between 
arguments to \item (nor \section).  It seems that only a few people 
misread the documentation (sometimes even after their error is pointed out 
to them).  What we can do is detect the error, and I am about to commit 
code in R-devel to do so.

Note that we don't have a complete description of the Rd language, but 
three partial parsers (Rdconv, tools::Rdparse and from R-devel, parseRd). 
If Duncan M's work on parseRd comes to fruition we may have a grammar and 
a parser, but it is likely to be for 'Rd2' format since no one wants to 
enshrine all the quirks of the current format.
Don't ask me how I found this, let us just say that long live
find-grep-dired in emacs and perseverance (or should that be
stubbornness?)

HTH.

Cheers,

	Berwin

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Berwin A Turlach                            Tel.: +65 6516 4416 (secr)
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Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
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Warning: missing text for item ... in \describe?

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