Two documentation questions
Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
On Wed, 4 Mar 2009, Terry Therneau wrote: [SNIP]
2. In the pdf for the survival package, or at least the one generated by R CMD check, the entries are in a random order. Can I fix this? It makes reading the document to look for errors rather challenging. (That is, when I'm looking at a particular Rd file, and want to see what it turned out to be.)
They should not be 'random'. E.g. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/survival/survival.pdf is not: it is in alphabetical order (C locale), and that is what I see for R CMD check in 2.8.1 (but in the collation order of the locale; this is done by Perl so depends on what it thinks is appropriate). This is one of the things that is changing for R 2.9.0, and hence in current R-devel. R CMD check will always uses R CMD Rd2dvi, and that produces PDF manuals in alphabetic order of the Rd files, in the current locale (I think Rd2dvi was always in C collation in earlier versions).
I think the key point here is "alphabetical order of the .Rd files". If
you do not choose the names of those files carefully, the PDF file
produced by R CMD check may indeed appear to be random....
-- Kevin
R CMD check was more a check of the latex conversion of the files, not a final manual (it got bundles wrong, for example, omitted the DESCRIPTIOM and did not check that the index worked). R-devel it does produce a standard package manual, and the collation is by R. Collation is a messy area with lots of OS-dependent errors. That's why in R-devel we have moved almost all this to R code, where we can control it (and can replace the OS's collation services by ICU if available). And relevant to you is
sort(c("Surv", "surv", "survdiff"))
[1] "surv" "Surv" "survdiff" which is what ICU thinks is right in English (and for one set of English rules, it is -- further it allows you to tune them).