Well, I think it would be a headache, and suboptimal, to require vignettes to be renderable as text. There are several issues including that not all vignettes have an included "source" file; there are packages with important vignettes which are only available as PDFs (or HTML). Also math and plot rendering. I don't think this is what Martin was alluding to.
But being able to link between the help files and the vignettes would be great. In Bioconductor we have been using vignettes for ages and they contain a lot of extremely useful information, to the extent that I would always first look at the vignette and only look at the Rd file for technical details. Best, Kasper On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 1:23 PM, Boylan, Ross <ross.boy...@ucsf.edu> wrote: > One issue with integrating vignettes into the help system is that > vignettes are > more likely to have material (figures, math) that renders poorly or not at > all as text. > I also mostly use ESS on terminal rather than graphical interface, and so > like the plain text version of things. OTOH, I used Sweave specifically > so > I could put math in the vignette. > > Does anyone have any thoughts about the substantive division of info > between help files and > vignettes? > Ross > ________________________________________ > From: Martin Maechler [maech...@stat.math.ethz.ch] > Sent: Friday, July 15, 2016 5:32 AM > To: Duncan Murdoch > Cc: Enrico Schumann; Boylan, Ross; r-package-devel@r-project.org > Subject: Re: [R-pkg-devel] relation between vignettes and help files > > ...... > It is even worse, isn't it: Nowadays html help pages are (almost) > always created *dynamically* via R's help() or help.start(); > For my setup of 1000s of packages in my libraries in .libPaths(), > generating all the html pages is too costly > [I think Rstudio is now smart and does this in the background > for its *own* package data base ?? -- I wish we would enable to > do this easily in base R !] > > and I am using (ESS with) "text" help_type, and so these links > to the url in doc/html would not work for me. > > I wonder if we should not think harder about this, and provide a > portable solution. > > I do agree that it should be very desirable to have links portably, > in *both* directions between > our "reference manuals" ( = the help pages) and > our "user's manuals" ( = the vignettes ). > > Martin > > ______________________________________________ > R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
