[Rd] Reordering entries in package manual PDF's

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 1 Dec 2010, Aleksi Kallio wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have created my own R package and written the documentation in Rd
> format for each of the functions plus the package itself.
>
> However now the functions appear in a random order in the generated PDF
> and the package documentation entry is placed in between the functions, when 
> I would like it to be first, naturally.

I have never seen anything else.  Please do as the posting guide asked 
you, and given a reproducible example.

All the package manuals on CRAN have the following order:

foo-package.Rd, if present.
the remaining Rd files in alphabetical order in the current locale.

> Is there an easy way to specify the order of the entries in the
> generated documentation?

By the ordering of the names of the Rd files, but your readers will 
find anything other than alphabetical order of main topic unusual and 
maybe puzzling.

You could also call Rd2dvi/Rd2pdf with a list of files.

> Browsing through the R manual and mailing list archives did not find
> anything. Rd is all I need, so I would not like to start using any of
> the more advanced documentation tools.
>
> Thanks for your help!
>
> All the best,
> Aleksi
>
> P.S. Cross-posted from R-help, as instructed by one of the subscribers.

We do prefer posting in only one place.

-- 
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