[R] Help with Help on Windows

Duncan Murdoch murdoch.duncan at gmail.com
Fri Jan 11 19:34:44 CET 2013


On 11/01/2013 12:49 PM, Ross Boylan wrote:
> R 2.15.2 installed as a regular user on Windows 7.
>
> Three issues:
>
> 1. There is a start menu item for "R 2.15.2 Help" that opens a local web
> page.  If I click on packages, then base, then abbreviate I get
> "Firefox can't find the file at
> /C:/Users/rdboylan/Documents/R/R-2.15.2/library/base/html/abbreviate.html."
> The page before, which did display, was
> "file:///C:/Users/rdboylan/Documents/R/R-2.15.2/library/base/html/00Index.html"
> (the link that fails is being tried with the same file:///C:/ start,
> despite the text in the error message).
>
> Is this a bug?  Is there a way I can fix it?

That's a bug, that start menu item should not have been installed. You 
can't view the help unless R is running, because it is being generated 
dynamically.

You could create a shortcut with something like

<R HOME>\bin\x64\Rterm.exe -e "{help.start(); Sys.sleep(1000)}"

as the command, and set it to display minimized; it would run for 1000 
seconds before it died.  I don't think this is a great solution because 
it leaves that Rterm process sitting there, but maybe some variation on 
this would do what you want.

I will remove the code that generates the bad Start Menu entry from the 
installer.


>
> 2. ?'&&' produces "No documentation for ''&&'' in the specified packages
> and libraries".  This used to work.  Is this failure expected?
> Actually, I just discovered it works from the main R application. The
> failure is from ESS 12.09-1 on emacs 24.2.1, both of which were the
> latest as of last week.

This seems like a bug report to send to the ESS list.
>
> 3. Are the manuals available as info files (for use in emacs) anymore?
> I notice the FAQ ("2.7 What documentation exists for R?") does not list it.

Those aren't distributed, but you could probably build them yourself if 
you get the source, as the originals are still in *.texi format. The 
Windows makefiles don't have targets for them, but if you have the 
tools, the Unix makefiles should give you the right incantations.

Duncan Murdoch




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