Microsoft help files

From: Hin-Tak Leung

Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

I wonder if the software here:

http://morte.jedrea.com/~jedwin/projects/chmlib/

or at any of the links on that page might allow elimination of
the need for separately downloading the Microsoft Help compiler
-- which is just one more task that one must perform to get up
and running to build your own R packages on Windows.

Actually, why does one need to depend on the Microsoft Help 
compiler? The windows build of GNU makeinfo can generate MS *.hlp
file directly. That's more "native" MS windows than CHM files.

Personally my order of preference is

CHM > plain text > HLP

Isn't it true that even MS is moving away from HLP?

WINHLP comes with a built-in search-and-index functionalty, and rather
more user-friendly than CHM or plain text. I am talking about
indexing and searching sizeable documents with internal organizations
and structures. Even pdf is better the plain text. You want the 
R-reference manual as a text file?

I am against additional dependency (particularly at build-time, unless 
you bundle it), especially on software that has just been written
and may not be around/maintained in a few months' time
(one can at least say the microsoft CHM compiler will be around!).
Since much of R's documentation is already quite texinfo/makeinfo 
friendly, it is just an extra couple of line in the makefile to
generate hlp file, ditto for rtf and ditto for pdf.

HT