On 26/06/2009 7:36 AM, Thorn Thaler wrote:
Duncan Murdoch schrieb:
How did you produce the manual? When I do R CMD Rd2dvi on a package, I
get the package man page first. There are other ways to produce the
manual, and in some cases we may not control the sort order.
Well, I see. There is a misunderstanding regarding the term "package
documentation". What I meant (but probably didn't make clear enough ;)
by "package documentation" is the output generated from the file
"<package-name>-package.Rd", where I put some information about the
package itself. The idea was that if you type ?<package-name> you will
get a short overview of what the package is about.
Right, I understood that. The code run when you install a package is
intended to sort such pages to be first in the output, regardless of
what you name them.
When I ran "R CMD check" a pdf manual was created conveniently. Since
I'm new to package writing I was not aware that one has the possibility
to create another type of (pdf) package documentation via "R CMD
Rd2dvi". Rd2dvi puts a package summary on the very first page. The page
number on which the output from <package-name>-package.Rd itself appears
depends on the file name.
R CMD check runs R CMD Rd2dvi, and on my system (in R-devel, I didn't
check older versions) it puts the package page first. It uses a number
of options that may be different from what you chose, but I don't think
we have an option to control sort order for the man pages.
However, the output from Rd2dvi looks much neater, so I'll be happy with
this version. Thanks for your input.
By the way, is it possible to exclude certain "Rd" files from the
pdftexing process? The reason why I'd like to do that is, that my
<package-name>-package.Rd file is mainly the same as the preamble
created by Rd2dvi (basically a list of the functions of the package). It
would be convenient to have such a file for the R inline help, but it is
unnecessary in the pdf manual. Any ideas? (however, i've to confess that
this is really a minor problem ;)
I don't think there's currently a simple way to do that. What I'd
suggest is that you decide on what your most important form of
documentation is (PDF vs HTML, etc.), and then optimize your Rd files
for that form. For example, there's no need to list all functions in
the package man page: they're listed in the contents listing that comes
first, and since it is produced automatically, it's less likely to go
out of date than your own manually edited listing.
Duncan Murdoch
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