I use S-Plus 2000 on Windows 95. The Windows help files give me a fair bit
of frustration. For example, if I pull up the help file for "par" and want
to read about "pty", I have to manually search through the help file to find
"pty".
What I'd like is to be able to search an individual help file for text.
Does anybody have suggestions for this?
HTML would be good. "man" pages would be good (actually great since then a
person can use "man -k" and/or "grep" for searching). "nroff" is good since
there are utilities to turn it into other formats. Proprietary formats (from
Microsoft) are very, very, very bad.
Here are some of my own attempts to satisfy my desire:
1. Use Acrobat Reader to search the PDF manuals. Not too bad, but searching
is slow and results in lots of false positives.
2. I've searched for a freeware program that reads Windows help files and
has the ability to search individual help files. No luck.
3. I have searched on the web for a tool to convert Windows help files to
HTML files (or nroff, tex-info, or anything) and have come up with very
little.
4. Benno Sueselbeck converted nroff files to HTML and has them posted at
this site which I find extraordinarily useful and easy to use (Insightful,
please take note!)
http://www.uni-muenster.de/ZIV/Mitarbeiter/BennoSueselbeck/s-html/shelp.html
5. With the upcoming near-synchronization of Windows/UNIX versions of
S-Plus, would Insightful consider including source "code" for the help
(nroff or whatever they're using now) in a directory on the CD so we can
format it as we like best?
Thanks for any ideas. I'll summarize useful information to S-news.
Kevin Wright, Research Scientist
Pioneer Hi-Bred Int'l, x4054.
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