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How to link to vignette from .Rd file

5 messages · Duncan Murdoch, Dominick Samperi, Gavin Simpson +1 more

Original
Agner Fog
# 
I am building a package for various noncentral hypergeometric distributions.

I want to include some heavy mathematical formulas. It appears that the 
build and INSTALL commands produce only .chm files and not .pdf files 
from my .Rd files under Windows. This means that it cannot show 
complicated mathematical formulas.

The solution might be to include a .pdf file as a vignette. I tried 
that, but I can't find any way to link to the .pdf file or access it 
from any of the help facilities. The .pdf file is useless if the user 
can't find it.

I have placed the .pdf file under inst\doc\ together with an index.html 
file.
I have tried to link to the .pdf file from an .Rd file with 
\link{packagename/doc/xxx.pdf}
Duncan Murdoch
#
On 11/7/2006 8:51 AM, Agner Fog wrote:
Yes, that's a major problem in the current R help system.  You can give 
the user code that would work to show the vignette, but there's no way 
to create a live link to it.

There are a lot of problems with the help system, and vague plans to fix 
them, but there are a lot of meta-problems as well:  there is no 
agreement on whether it should it be a complete rewrite or an 
incremental fix, no agreement on exactly what the goals of the system 
should be (e.g. should help("foo") try to guess what the user meant when 
the exact topic "foo" was not found), there's more energy spent on 
criticizing proposed changes than on implementing anything at all, and 
there's nobody who has the time and energy to fight against all of this 
to actually do anything about it.

Duncan Murdoch
Dominick Samperi
#
Duncan Murdoch wrote:
The demo system can be used to compensate for limitations of the help 
system.
You can display PDF files from any package subdirectory using a demo file
like this (named demo/ReadPkgDoc.R, and documented in demo/00Index):

# ReadPkgDoc.R -- Displays a PDF file as a demo
#
isWindows <- (Sys.info()['sysname'] == 'Windows')
file <- system.file("doc", "PkgManual.pdf", package="PkgName")
if(isWindows) { # Windows automatically finds executable based on file type.
  system(paste("CMD /C ", file, "\n"))
} else { # Change this to use path to Adobe reader if desired.
  system(paste("xpdf ", file, "\n"))
}

To create the PDF file from the Rd file use R CMD Rd2dvi, and dvipdf.

ds
Gavin Simpson
#
On Tue, 2006-11-07 at 12:41 -0500, Dominick Samperi wrote:
<snip />
You can do this directly without dvipdf: 

R CMD Rd2dvi --pdf name_of_Rd_file.Rd

G
Agner Fog
# 
Thanks for the tip. I had thought of using the demo facility for this 
but I didn't know how to check for the operating system.
This is a clumsy solution, but better than nothing. I agree with Duncan 
that there is a problem with the help system. It should either have a 
way to embed formulas and graphics in .chm files, or a way to use .pdf 
files for help under all operating systems. The latter solution is 
probably easier to implement.

Unfortunately, I personally don't have the time to contribute to 
improving the help system of R. Maybe tasks like this could be offered 
as projects to university students. Many students are doing useless 
projects so why not use this resource for something useful.

I have proposed to use R instead of Matlab for teaching math and signal 
analysis at my university college, but I am not teaching math myself so 
it's not my decision. If more universities were using R instead of 
Matlab, Mathcad, SAS, etc. then they would also be motivated to 
contribute to the development.
Dominick Samperi wrote: