[Rd] How to make a package with help pages in multiple languages?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2011, Kjetil Halvorsen wrote:

> This question was adsked on R-help-es, and got no responses there.
> the OP asked for help pages in english and spanish. Any ideas how this
> should be done? I guess there really should be a solution for any number of
> languages.

Rcmdr had English and Spanish help overviews, as I recall, and now has
PDFs in English, Spanish, Japanese and Russian.

The short answer is that we don't have a way to do it, and we have a 
default encoding for a package which makes this awkward.  I think I 
would simply prepare separate packages foo.en and foo.es which 
differed only in the man directory (and there are packages 
openNLPmodels.{en.es}).  And although they do differ in detail, the 
two largest installed packages on CRAN are nutshell and nutshellDE.

If there were enough demand and someone was prepared to put the work 
in, we could have man-es in the sources and help-es, html-es in the 
installed packages.  But the amount of work would be non-trivial, as 
for example 'R CMD check' would have to check all the installed 
languages.  But I suspect the demand is far too low to consider doing 
this.

>
> Kjetil
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

-- 
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