[R] Generating Rd format under Windows

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, Trenkler, Dietrich wrote:

> Excuse me if this question  has been answered before.
> 
> I just came across "Writing R documentation" in the "Writing R
> extensions" 
> manual.  Under section 2.9:  "Processing Rd format" I only
> find hints at generating the Rd format on a Unix platform.  Have I
> overlooked how to generate them under Windows?

That section is about *processing* not generating the .Rd files, so I am
not wure which you want to do.  I will try to answer both. Generating them
is the same: use prompt(), complete the file in your favourite editor.

The processing scripts have not been ported to Windows, although as most of
them are Perl scripts it would not be hard to do so.  (Normally all you
would need to do is to remove the #! @PERL@ line, set
R_HOME in the environment and use, e.g.

perl Rdconv.in -t txt --os=Windows foo.Rd

No guarantees, but that worked once at least. E.g. Rd2dvi is a shell
script and looks very much less easy to port.)

What is available are the Makefiles to compile a library, which converts
all the .Rd files to the forms used for on-line help (and off-line
latex-based help).

None of the core developers uses Windows primarily, and Windows does not
have a single standard shell (nor even a single port of Perl until very
recently) and hence no standard way to run a Perl script. So if you want
ports to Windows, please port them and let us know (on R-devel) what you
used. (You will need to get the sources of the scripts from the source
distribution in src/scripts.)

-- 
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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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