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Summary of mails concerning R help system -- really --

3 messages · Martin Maechler, Friedrich Leisch, Peter Dalgaard

Original
Martin Maechler
# 
Excuse everyone my almost empty E-mail !!
FrL> Hi,

    FrL> here's a short summary of all the mails I got concerning the R
    FrL> help system during the last days ... I really want to have all
    FrL> open questions in this list, so if I forgot your most important
    FrL> topic please forgive (and remind me again) ... it's probably only
    FrL> because of lack of time such that I had to compile the list in a
    FrL> hurry ...

	.......

    FrL> 4) Rdconv -t rtf to support the windoze help format ... I
    FrL> definetely don't have time or any motivation to do that, so if
    FrL> somebody wants to do that, he's welcome.

In the  V&R (Venables & Ripley) Online Complements to MASS2,
	[page 3, producing Windows help files]
I've found that they provide a
	troff -> rtf
translation utility ("spwinhlp.zip" )
for S-plus help pages, and then mention the Windows help-compiler for 
producing windows *.hlp files

In principle, one could use this as

	foo.Rd	--->  foo.troff  -->  foo.rtf  --> foo.hlp
		 1		  2		3
 1: Rdconv
 2: spwinhlp
 3: Windows help compiler.

If anyone here (of you R-develers) is willing to do these steps,
I am sure that the CRAN maintainers will glad to include these *.hlp files
in the 'preformatted-help' directories.

However, I agree with Luke Tierney, that also for windows, HTML should be
enough in principle.

Martin
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Friedrich Leisch
# 
MM> Excuse everyone my almost empty E-mail !!
ites:

MM> ...
MM> However, I agree with Luke Tierney, that also for windows, HTML shoul=
d be
MM> enough in principle.

Especially now that I'm finished with supporting short filenames for HTML
conversion :-)

So the next windows version could/should contain all html help files.=20

I will submit this to the current sources in a minute.

Best,
Fritz

--=20
-------------------------------------------------------------------
                        Friedrich  Leisch                            =20
Institut f=FCr Statistik                      Tel: (+43 1) 58801 4541
Technische Universit=E4t Wien                 Fax: (+43 1)  504 14 98
Wiedner Hauptstra=DFe 8-10/1071      Friedrich.Leisch@ci.tuwien.ac.at
A-1040 Wien, Austria             http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~leisch
     PGP public key http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~leisch/pgp.key
-------------------------------------------------------------------

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Peter Dalgaard
# 
Friedrich Leisch <Friedrich.Leisch@ci.tuwien.ac.at> writes:
Yup. 

There are still two arguments remaining for doing the WinHelp thingie:

- Uniformity with other Windows application (if compiler vendors are
shipping with HTML help, that point may be a bit moot, though.)

- People who don't have the browsers. Getting rare nowadays, I suppose.

Anyways, I found out that an elaborate tex2rtf system is contained in
the wxwin package, so if someone has a couple of spare days (or
weeks), I suspect that it would be rather easy to change it into
rdconv -t rtf. I agree, however, that there's no particular hurry with
this compared to all the other stuff we want to do.