Hello R people I always wander what other people say about the R help. Finally after some years of using, I decided that it is probably time to try to do something about it, because the feeling of gritting teeth does not go away with years of usage. :) Moreover, I think it is one of the few things where R does not kick asses to the other statistical softwares. So, to the point:
I get the feeling (by some experience with learning programming languages when I am not primarily a programmer but economist/statistician) that structure of help really helps and I would like to have it to go in the way basic syntax (by basic I really mean only the necessary arguments) example for "dummies", to see what it does click-here-if-you-want-to-know-more menu/button The best documentation that I ever used is probably one of Mathematica, look for example here http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Fit.html (it is somehow related to the stuff below). So what I did is that I took R help file for Fitting Linear Models ( http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/stats/html/lm.html ) and put it into some more readable shape for me. So I built some other version (actually two) look at http://pinda.sifruje.cz/ . The "original" is just the same text taken and only some basic stuff solved (on my 27 inch monitor, if I make the browser full screen the original help is almost unreadable, because it stretches from one end to the other. Next we already have some pretty good fonts so why not to use them, here Linux Biolinum, and I did some to me aesthetic changes...). The "custom" goes a bit deeper and tries to implement a bit more of my thoughts. The buttons are really made quickly and only as an example. Also I do not claim that the code is anywhere good, I spent like hour or two just sawing some pieces that already lay around web. Just take it as some demonstration. What I would like to receive from you is your opinions about this topic. The stuff that I did is pretty easy to do even algorithmically (some parser could probably parse the existing help files). The only added value here is making important stuff more visible. I also added the "dummies" example. So please tell me what you think. I am a bit busy and if I do anything with it I would like to have it thought through carefully beforehand. Also if anybody would be interested in helping, or if he is running similar project, tell me. Thanks, Tomas. [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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.
