R-code in html help pages: syntax highlighting
On 3/16/2009 1:49 PM, Jose Quesada wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi, A follow up to my previous post. It'd be good to have syntax highlighting in the html help pages.
This needs two things: making the highlight program available to R, and then adding it to the Rd to HTML conversion code. In current releases that conversion is done in Perl code, but with R 2.9 an R-based converter will be available (but not used by default; too many CRAN packages have too many errors in their Rd files, and the new converter is more sensitive to such things). So sometime after 2.9.0 is released, it would seem like a reasonable project to modify the conversion to allow for syntax highlighting. One likely complaint is that the highlighting will be inaccurate. Typically highlighters just have a list of things they know to be important names, they don't actually take scoping rules into account (so mean gets highlighted as a built in function even when used as mean <- (x + y)/2 for example). So it would be interesting if someone wanted to do the work to make a syntax highlighter that was accurate. I'd say the R core work on something like this would be to provide the hook for a user to link in their own favourite highlighter; I doubt if we'd want to take on the bitching that the inaccurate highlighting would attract. Duncan Murdoch There is highlight
(http://www.andre-simon.de/) which seems to be open source. Since code is delimited in the help file format, it should not be too difficult to run a highlighting program (actually, vim and emacs do this too) recursively and pretty-print all the R examples in the entire CRAN. Including the highlighter with R, or whatever supplementary tools people use to make R html help files could simplify things. I've never written docs or released a package, so I may be understimating the effort it'd take to get this working. Using the r-help gmane archives also leads to plain code. This is probably more trouble than it's worth, since there's no metadata delimiting a block of code and it might be difficult... but grepping through all R-help posts and coloring code would be really nice too. Again, this lands straight into 'nice to have, but not essential' territory. If anyone wants to do this, feel free to. Best, - -J - -- Jose Quesada, PhD. Max Planck Institute, Center for Adaptive Behavior and cognition, Berlin http://www.josequesada.name/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iQIVAwUBSb6RRGMobUVGH+HKAQI2RxAAijNIj7qlBogc9M6lhQ2Ah1Px29iU/uzS 45t5blwNSGVSbAbZF7N7rRcBdn8/c4W8n+oI62nnap0snwLMFW/ynikVNJuBY+XA +yNaO5nIJo5SWu60WkcMinm/ysPZ4o4Jdxr1+lGfJ/ceVSTWPWVLb//GN8QElgwT Vf0ZQUSqfWczzeVDSDtfMKGTJOz4y60eF5hounA/PkzyUd8RRo1WpEXzJHYsCTI+ RwBrYZ5Q30cpKLAJQNeiiv8GDtv7QvJl38uRAqBRK5Ec9CGC0brGZquX8UgHi1q1 1+NzHSt95E4Y0CKWPS48t+eO58MUE8v69gjLa9DdnhII4tCdAUURuP+AsaFm+hzP a7OufMNnh/S8igDmqon0c9W6sJrkDo9DdrZPlu6MFjGQ5SbS6mSfvwSRKVd3RTCN 2/+uz0EwBygq1OKS+Z7Z+kx29UR8+bNXOGaPRlsr5CKcwVV9w3FBvEICuDaP75vj l0d75+2R+CB/R/e2+dMMRCQY5MNWtYuuqoz3jNws59J+0z5K35usLoaKdB7Ez3D6 G2CCBKJSrugT0s8OkhX5pcTiU6NUIrq6q8h7JNEeuR0bniFClXlDrAs9iIdNb4PS oFpqtNJWPLaicHRMnJdnxPCriHa0lmI3QVoGrf6UFtBAXuiOkFxcHUmTcQczyfOm IGyGcgCko3o= =djsT -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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