[Rd] Re: [R-SIG-Mac] R version on gifi

[Don MacQueen]

At 6:33 PM +0100 6/17/03, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Don MacQueen wrote:
>
>>  At 5:45 PM +0200 6/17/03, Simon Urbanek wrote:
>
>>  >There is still one issue to consider in this context: source
>>  >packages. A really 'plain' Mac OS X can't be used to install source
>>  >packages as-is, basically because there are three missing things:
>>  >Dev Tools, g77 and latex. The first one is official, so we could
>>  >require that (and probably have to). G77 is really just a few files,
>>  >so the installer could add it if necessary, but I'm not sure about
>>  >latex. Is building packages w/o latex documentation an option?
>>
>>  For an OS X user with no unix background, I would think that pdf is
>>  the preferred format, and sufficient.
>
>PDF is produced via latex in R.

I didn't know that. Does it require a full latex installation, or 
could one get by with just a subset, perhaps just pdflatex? It's 
probably a bad idea to complicate matters that way, though.

>   Would that really be preferred to HTML?

Speaking for myself, yes.

Speaking of which, this is another area where OS X is not like other 
versions of unix; the "native OS X" way to start a browser on the 
command line is with the "open" command, i.e., "open filename.html". 
OS X needs, for example,
     browseURL('somefile.html',browser='open')

>Nothing in R is setup to produce PDF help, and especially not PDF
>hyperlinked between different documents (which is a problem in a dynamic
>framework).
>
>BTW, could this sort of discussion go on in R-SIG-Mac or R-devel but not
>both since R-SIG-Mac is a closed list.
>
>--
>Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
>Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
>University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
>1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
>Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595


-- 
--------------------------------------
Don MacQueen
Environmental Protection Department
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Livermore, CA, USA