[R] html glitches with help?

[Ross Boylan]

Looking at the html generated help pages for a package I'm working on, I
noticed a couple of things that looked a little funny.  I suspect they
are general features of the html for R (I don't usually look at it).

First is a problem of vertical alignment in tables. The first column
consistently aligned vertically *below* the alignment line of the bottom
line of the second column.  This was a problem even when both columns
were a single line; it was worse when they were multiple lines.

In slightly exagerated form, the output looked like this:

       long discussion of what paramater pp does
       and its wonderful features
pp

Likely at least two separate issues: why is it aligning with the last,
rather than the first, line of the second column, and why is it below
that?

It may be relevant that the first column was in \code{a} and the whole
thing was in an \arguments{\item{foo}{\tabular{ll} section.

Second, the items marked with \code{} appeared fainter than the other
text, and were a little hard to read.  I'd expect them to be bolder.

Perhaps the R.css style sheet could be tweaked for this?
R 1.7.1-1 on Debian GNU/Linux
Viewed with Mozilla 1.4
Konqueror from KDE 3.1.3 looked very similar, except the typeface for
\code was identical to that of the rest.

Sample excerpt from the .Rd file:

\value{returns a list:
  \item{singles}{data frame, one row per simulation, with the following
    columns:
    \tabular{ll}{
      coefficients \tab one column per variable\cr

      \code{pi1} \tab conditional probability of sampling cases \cr

Similar behavior in \arguments section.  It is the pi1 above, for
example, that is aligned poorly.  Alignment of the outer level \item's
is better (in fact, the opposite problem, their baseline is above the
baseline of the first line of the second column, though their tops are
not much higher).

-- 
Ross Boylan                                      wk:  (415) 502-4031
530 Parnassus Avenue (Library) rm 115-4          ross at biostat.ucsf.edu
Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics           fax: (415) 476-9856
University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, CA 94143-0840                     hm:  (415) 550-1062