Dear Kevin,
You raised some excellent points. I believe that things are actually
going to get worse in S-Plus 6.0 as I think that even more
proprietary (if that's possible) Microsoft help software will
be used on the Windows version, while Java will be used on
other versions. The Java-based help system is, from my
limited testing, somewhat slow and does not render the
display very clearly. Search capabilities are not impressive.
The Java help system uses a lot of memory. I hope that
someone from Insightful will correct me if I have
misstated any of this or if I have not kept up with current
developments of the help system.
The HTML system you provided a link to is impressive. I
would like to know how the files were converted. I have
not been able to understand why S-Plus does not rely more
on HTML except for the issues related to math symbols and
graphics.
For my Hmisc and Design libraries I plan to maintain html
online documentation (see
http://hesweb1.med.virginia.edu/biostat/s/help/00Index.html
) as a primary format. A disadvantage of this approach is
that it fails to link into "See also" functions that are
in the main package.
For the R html help system see
http://stat.ethz.ch/R-alpha/Rrelease/doc/html/
Frank Harrell
"Wright, Kevin" wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> This message was distributed by s-news@lists.biostat.wustl.edu. To
> unsubscribe send e-mail to s-news-request@lists.biostat.wustl.edu with
> the BODY of the message: unsubscribe s-news
--
Frank E Harrell Jr Prof. of Biostatistics & Statistics
Div. of Biostatistics & Epidem. Dept. of Health Evaluation Sciences
U. Virginia School of Medicine http://hesweb1.med.virginia.edu/biostat
|