[R] HTML help -- as a single document for the entire package

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 06/04/2016 12:06 PM, Holger Hoefling wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> thanks - I do have that as well. That is a good chance to clarify. The 
> regular help gives a *separate* page for every single function. The 
> regular pdf-manual gives one document for *all* functions in a package.
>
> The nice thing about having a single html page for all functions in a 
> package would be that it is easily searchable in the browser, it is 
> more lightweight than a pdf and wouldn't be restricted by formatting 
> based on the notion that it has to be printable to a page on paper.
>
> I was wondering if something like this exists ... and Duncan very 
> quickly answered that for me.

If you wanted to write it yourself, you would need to modify the 
tools::Rd2HTML function, and write a wrapper that called it for every Rd 
page.  This would be mostly straightforward:  instead of working for 
just one file, it would need to loop over all of them; it would also 
need to handle links between topics differently than it currently does, 
because some of them would be internal links, others would be external.

The source for the function is in 
https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/library/tools/R/Rd2HTML.R.

Duncan Murdoch

>
> Thanks
>
> Holger
>
> On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 5:57 PM, David Winsemius 
> <dwinsemius at comcast.net <mailto:dwinsemius at comcast.net>> wrote:
>
>
>     > On Apr 6, 2016, at 2:37 AM, Duncan Murdoch
>     <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com <mailto:murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>> wrote:
>     >
>     > On 06/04/2016 4:17 AM, Holger Hoefling wrote:
>     >> Hi,
>     >>
>     >> I was wondering if there was an equivalent to the pdf-manual for
>     >> R-packages, but rendered as a single html page? I am looking
>     for this as it
>     >> would make reading easier as
>     >> - no restriction to the standard paper width, but flowing to
>     the browser
>     >> window size
>     >> - no page breaks
>     >> - full text search across the entire manual.
>     >
>     > No, there isn't.
>
>     My somewhat different understanding may simply be a reflection of
>     a different operating system (given my inferior knowledge of the R
>     ecosystems to that of Duncan). I run R in the R.app GUI on a Mac
>     and the Help menu dropdown choice brings up links (in browser
>     form) to local versions of the documents that I thought were 
>     shipped with every new installation. Assuming your request is for
>     an html version of "Writing R Extensions", then I get one with:
>
>     http://127.0.0.1:15834/doc/manual/R-exts.html
>
>     --
>     David.
>
>
>     > Duncan Murdoch
>     >
>     > ______________________________________________
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>
>     David Winsemius
>     Alameda, CA, USA
>
>