[R] R help search engine

[apjaworski@mmm.com]

I recently "discovered" how useful the search engine & keywords portion of
R help can be.  I often remember that I could do certain things in R but do
not quite remember the right commands.  The keywords by topic section of
the search engine is particularly useful for that.  It incorporates
information from installed packages which makes it even more useful.

I just ran into the following problem.  I was looking at the rug command -
the one that adds a rug to a plot.  Then, out of curiosity, I went to the
keywords by topic section of help and tried to locate rug there.  I
expected it to be in the graphics/aplot but instead I found it in hplot.  I
know this sounds like nitpicking, but the description of the rug is
entitled "Add a Rug to a Plot" and the description of, say, arrows is
entitled "Add Arrows to a Plot", but the latter is in aplot and the former
in hplot.

I found the actual index file in $R_HOME/doc/html/search/index.txt.  This
file seems to be (re)generated from the CONTENTS files for each library
every time a package is installed or help.start function is called with
update=TRUE.  So a simple solution is simply to edit the CONTENTS file
changing hplot keyword to aplot.

I suppose the choice of keywords is up the package author/maintainer.  It
seems like in the case of rug it was just a simple mistake.

Sorry for a longish post about such a trivial matter.  The more I work with
R the more amazed I am how well things are thought out.  I just wanted to
share this with the group.

Andy

__________________________________
Andy Jaworski
Engineering Systems Technology Center
3M Center, 518-1-01
St. Paul, MN 55144-1000
-----
E-mail: apjaworski at mmm.com
Tel:  (651) 733-6092
Fax:  (651) 736-3122

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