Problems with "help(topic,offline=T)"

Hello everybody,

since I installed R-0.90.0 (Linux 2.0.25) I have problems with generating
printable output with 'help()'.

Default output to the terminal ('echo $PAGER' gives 'less') works o.k..
When invoking 'help(topic,offline=T)' all the usual procedures seem to
start: 'top' reports invocation of latex as well as of dvips. But after
finishing there is no file; neither *.ps nor *.dvi files exist.

I checked for suspicous environment settings but couldn't find anything.
Also my dvips without problems produces files and doesn't send its output
to the printer when being invoked from the shell level. I thought of
problems there because my machine has no local printing device. 

I set 'options(printcmd="")' which didn't help either. 

Any ideas?

Works for me...

The last few lines of the help ($RHOME/bin/help) script say

    ${LATEX} "\\nonstopmode\\input{${1}}" >/dev/null 2>&1
    ${DVIPS} ${1} 2>/dev/null
    if test -f ${1}.ps;
    then
        echo "Saving help page to \`${2}.ps'"
        mv ${1}.ps ${ODIR}/${2}.ps
    fi
    rm -f ${1}.aux ${1}.dvi ${1}.log

So if you're not seeing the "Saving help page to \`${2}.ps'" bit,
chances are that ${DVIPS} sends directly to the printer, or tries to. 

The other option is that ${LATEX} or  ${DVIPS} is failing fatally, for
some reason that you won't see because of the redirections.
Temporarily replacing /dev/null with a real file might reveal the
source of the mystery.

It's not a mystery that the .dvi files are cleaned up, cf the last
line above.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907

Peter,

first of all thanks for the quick reply! I followed your instructions and
redirected the dvips and latex output to a file. The main problem seems to
be that latex complains about a missing style file ("bm.sty"). I felt my
latex distribution could be out of time and first searched the server of
the german TeX users group for an adequate style. Unfortunately without
success. Is that "bm.sty" shipped with R, or rather should it be?