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Two documentation questions

4 messages · Terry Therneau, Gabor Grothendieck, Brian Ripley +1 more

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1. I often like to put bits of the output into the manual pages.  (We can
have a discussion of the value of this elsewhere -- I think it is sometimes
a good thing.)
  In R I need to surround these with \dontrun{} for the sake of the tester, 
which is fine.  But the printed output contains 
	## Not run
and 
        ## End (not run)

comments, which defeats the purpose of the lines by breaking them off from
the their context.  How do I turn these off?  For printing \dontrun should
be a no-op.  Or at least I should have the option of making it so -- I'm rather
opinionated about the format of things I prepare for teaching purposes.
You can assume medium Tex skills in answering; my book is in Latex but I
don't create my own formats.       

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.)

   Terry Therneau
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Perhaps you could just place the output in comments.

print(5) # 5

head(BOD, 2)
#   Time demand
# 1    1    8.3
# 2    2   10.3
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Terry Therneau <therneau at mayo.edu> wrote:
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On Wed, 4 Mar 2009, Terry Therneau wrote:

            
I presume you mean in the \examples section of the .Rd files, not 
elsewhere in the help.
'printed output'?  We have conversion to text, HTML, latex and .R, and 
they are all done separately.  I guess you are only concerned with 
conversion to latex?
I'm not sure why it 'should'. Conversion to latex is not just for 
printing, nor is \dontrun primarily for output.  Indeed, at one point 
a couple of months ago the parseRd function required what was in 
\dontrun to be valid R code.

I certainly find having the \dontrun material in the package PDF 
manual helpful on occasion.
If you mean conversion to latex, you could either alter Rdconv.pm 
or post-process the output: this is in a verbatim-like section so it 
would not be easy to do so in LaTeX.  If I did this often I would be 
adding some markup for this purpose, but post-processing in R should 
be easy (and tools:::massageExamples (in R-devel) does so).
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).

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
[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).
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Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
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