On 13/07/2016 4:04 PM, Enrico Schumann wrote:
On Wed, 13 Jul 2016, "Boylan, Ross" <ross.boy...@ucsf.edu> writes:

I have two questions, one substantive and one technical, about the
relation between vignettes and help files.  By "help files" I mean the
regular .Rd files.

Substantively, to what extent should material be duplicated between
the help files and the vignette?  For example, my vignette includes
some output summarizing the analysis.  The output has many different
kinds of information, and the details about what they mean are in the
help for the function generating the output.  Any advice on how much
of that information to put in the vignette?.  The vignette could, of
course, say to see the help for the function for details.

It seems natural to me to have the information in both places, except
that doing so invites inconsistencies as the code changes, if not
immediately.

The leads to the the technical question: is there a way to provide
links to the help from the vignette?  I'm using Sweave.  And,
similarly, is there a way to reference the vignettes from the help?
In particular, it seems natural to reference the vignette from the
package help.

Thanks.
Ross Boylan


I think this was discussed very recently on R-help:

https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2016-June/439867.html

I seem to recall that links from PDF files into the help system don't work, because those *must* be relative links, and I think PDF files don't support relative links. (It is possible to set up your system so you can use absolute links by always running the help system on the same port, but you can't count on your users to be doing that.)

So Ross is probably out of luck if he's using Sweave.

Duncan Murdoch

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