pdf package help files

-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org 
[mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Spencer Graves
Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2010 1:35 PM
To: Duncan Murdoch
Cc: r-help at r-project.org; eric
Subject: Re: [R] pdf package help files

Hi, Duncan:


       I'm confused:


help_start()
Error: could not find function "help_start"


       Thanks,
       Spencer
sessionInfo()
R version 2.12.0 (2010-10-15)
Platform: i386-pc-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252 [2] 
LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252 [3] 
LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252 [4] LC_NUMERIC=C [5] 
LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

 >

On 12/18/2010 1:19 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

On 18/12/2010 2:20 PM, eric wrote:

Newbie here...just learning

Do most packages come with pdf versions of the help files 

? If yes, 

how to I access the entire pdf file to be able to print it 

? Is there 

a standard command for that ?

No, the pdf version is not normally installed.  If you want 

to see the 

same content on a locally installed package, run

help_start()

then browse to the package.  The pdf files are just concatenated 
versions of all the help pages shown in that index.

You can produce the pdf using

R CMD Rd2dvi --pdf foo

where foo is a directory holding the source code to the package. 
Alternatively, as others have suggested, just look at the 

PDF on CRAN.

Duncan Murdoch