[R] RFC: help systems on Windows

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

To: Windows Users
-----------------

We would appreciate your comments on future possibilities for help on
Windows systems. I have put up a pre-test version based on the current
R-release snapshot at

http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/bdr/RWin/rwtest999.zip  (ca 4.5Mb)
ftp://ftp.stats.ox.ac.uk/....

(999 means Sept 1999, BTW).  This has 

(i)   text help
(ii)  HTML help to be viewed in Netscape/IE*
(iii) latex help, all as before
(iv)  Compiled HTML Help (*.chm)
(v)   Windows Help (*.hlp)

We need to make some choices and would value your input.

(iv) is the help system that Office 2000 and (I am told) Windows 2000 uses.
According to Microsoft's docs, you will need Internet Explorer 3 and
perhaps 4 installed to use it, or use the updater file at
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/RWin/hhupd.exe.

(v) Is the standard Windows 95/NT4 help.  We know the translation is a
bit rough: it can be improved if people want this style of help.

In particular, we would like your votes on what you like, and to know
whether you have any difficulty using Compiled HTML.

As this is based on R-release there are many new features you can explore,
described in the CHANGES and NEWS files.  Please do remember this is a 
pre-test, only tested on one machine (under NT4sp5 with IE5 and
Office 2000 installed), and don't expect too much.

As Windows is a minority interest, please reply to Guido and me, or if you
want to raise more general development issues, Cc: the R-devel list.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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