Hello, The vignette concept, which started in Bioconductor, seems to be catching on. They are supported by R CMD build/check and documented in the Writing R Extensions manual. I think vignettes are a fantastic way to introduce new users to a package. However, getting new users to realize that a vignette is available can be challenging.
For some time now, we have had a function in Biobase that creates a "Vignettes" menu item in the R Windows GUI and gives packages a mechanism to register their vignettes so that they appear on this menu. I would like to see this functionality included in R so that there can be a standard mechanism that doesn't depend on Biobase of registering a package's vignettes with one of the R GUIs (currently only Windows is supported, but I imagine the OS X GUI could also implement this). Below is the implementation we have been using. Is there an R-core member I can interest in pushing this along? I'm willing to submit a patch with documentation, etc. + seth addVigs2WinMenu <- function(pkgName) { if ((.Platform$OS.type == "windows") && (.Platform$GUI == "Rgui") && interactive()) { vigFile <- system.file("Meta", "vignette.rds", package=pkgName) if (!file.exists(vigFile)) { warning(sprintf("%s contains no vignette, nothing is added to the menu bar", pkgName)) } else { vigMtrx <- .readRDS(vigFile) vigs <- file.path(.find.package(pkgName), "doc", vigMtrx[,"PDF"]) names(vigs) <- vigMtrx[,"Title"] if (!"Vignettes" %in% winMenuNames()) winMenuAdd("Vignettes") pkgMenu <- paste("Vignettes", pkgName, sep="/") winMenuAdd(pkgMenu) for (i in vigs) { item <- sub(".pdf", "", basename(i)) winMenuAddItem(pkgMenu, item, paste("shell.exec(\"", as.character(i), "\")", sep = "")) } } ## else ans <- TRUE } else { ans <- FALSE } ans } -- Seth Falcon | Computational Biology | Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center http://bioconductor.org ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel