[Rd] Help file doesn't display correctly

Duncan Murdoch murdoch at stats.uwo.ca
Tue Oct 6 22:23:40 CEST 2009


On 10/6/2009 12:01 PM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Oct 2009, Ronggui Huang wrote:
> 
>> 2009/10/6 Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk>:
>>> On Tue, 6 Oct 2009, Ronggui Huang wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dear R Developer,
>>>>
>>>> It seems to be a problem with help file. Not sure if it is related to
>>>> the new format of Rd parser. Multiple lines are joined together
>>>> without proper line break.
>>>
>>> It was a problem with the handling of fancy quotes in a DBCS encoding (as
>>> used for CJK languages).  We don't attempt to use them for sQuote(), and
>>> will no longer attempt to use them for help.  This will take effect in
>>> r49952 and later, and seems to work for me in CP936.
>>>
>>> It is not easy for us to test in Chinese Windows (most non-Chinese editions
>>> do not support it, or need add-ons installed), so please keep on reporting
>>> issues, particularly those with help (text, HTML, PDF?) rendering.
>>
>> As for the HTML help, it works if I launch it by help.start(), but the
>> link becomes broken if I launch it by click  menu "help- html help".
> 
> That is the expected behaviour, since it uses static HTML help and no 
> prebuilt package HTML pages are being shipped.  I don't know if Duncan 
> wants to change it to call an R function, but that would have the 
> disadvantage of being unavailable when R is running (you will note 
> that that menu item is not greyed out when Rgui is running 
> computations, unlike most others).

I think it is better to make the change, so that the help pages are 
available.  You can jump between pages once the browser is open 
(hopefully the server is handling this safely; it hasn't crashed for me 
yet).

I'll commit this...

Duncan Murdoch



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