[Rd] Links to non-vignette documentation

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 23 Feb 2006, hadley wickham wrote:

>>>> Is there anyway to have my pdf documentation listed under vignettes
>>>> other than making it a sweave file?
>>
>> No, a vignette is regarded as an Sweave file.
>
> It would be useful if there was a mechanism to allow arbitrary pdf
> files to be included as vignettes.  There are many other ways to
> include R code/output in pdf files other than through Sweave.

I think you need to define `vignette'.  I understand the usage to mean an
Sweave file.  There are ways to include other PDF files, and you can write 
your own index file.  R can't do that for you as it cannot read PDF (it 
can read Sweave).

>> I just tried this by adding inst/doc/foo.pdf to windlgs.  If there is an
>> pdf file but no .[RS]nw vignettes, the index is fairly useless but
>> browsing is available.
>>
>>> I don't know if the sentence about pointers being created is true otherwise.
>>
>> It seems to be.
>
> A link to the directory where the pdf is located, only available in
> the html version of help, rather stretches the definition of a
> pointer.

What is a link if not a pointer?  What it actually says is

    Pointers from package help indices to the installed
    documents are automatically created.

I am not aware of any other sort of `package help index', although one 
could arge the toss about Compiled HTML.

-- 
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