I guess Emacs + ESS + roxygen might be the easiest way to write an R package. Writing or modifying Rd files/templates, in my eyes, is really time-consuming and the Rd files are difficult to maintain (unless you really have a good memory). I became reluctant to maintain my R packages simply because I felt painful to maintain the documentation. After I learned a bit about roxygen and ESS a few months ago, several of my packages came back to life again (e.g. this picture is a piece of evidence: https://github.com/yihui/animation/graphs/impact). The feeling was probably like when Dr Harrell switched from SAS to S (see library(fortunes); fortune('I quit using SAS')).
Anyway, prompt() and package.skeleton() are very helpful in the short run. Regards, Yihui -- Yihui Xie <xieyi...@gmail.com> Phone: 515-294-2465 Web: http://yihui.name Department of Statistics, Iowa State University 2215 Snedecor Hall, Ames, IA On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 5:30 PM, Michael Friendly <frien...@yorku.ca> wrote: > On 2/11/2011 2:52 AM, Dr. Michael Wolf wrote: >> >> Dear R colleagues, >> > ... >> >> From the point of the costs e. g. I had to learn writing help files in >> a TeX-like language. But I'm the typical Word user. My last TeX writings >> were done in the 1990s! If I'm changing only a letter in a source file >> (r-file or help file) I've to build a new package. Seeing the results in >> my eyes this is a very expansive way. It's easier to me to write those >> files in HTML and to change the HTML source code. I don't need help >> files in Rd format. >> > > You can make things a whole lot easier by using prompt() to write the > skeletons of the .Rd files. Then you have a ready-made template for > your function or data and only need to fill in the details. Once you > try this, you'll find it's not really any different than HTML markup. > > ?prompt > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
