I recently "discovered" how useful the search engine & keywords portion of R help can be. I often remember that I could do certain things in R but do not quite remember the right commands. The keywords by topic section of the search engine is particularly useful for that. It incorporates information from installed packages which makes it even more useful. I just ran into the following problem. I was looking at the rug command - the one that adds a rug to a plot. Then, out of curiosity, I went to the keywords by topic section of help and tried to locate rug there. I expected it to be in the graphics/aplot but instead I found it in hplot. I know this sounds like nitpicking, but the description of the rug is entitled "Add a Rug to a Plot" and the description of, say, arrows is entitled "Add Arrows to a Plot", but the latter is in aplot and the former in hplot. I found the actual index file in $R_HOME/doc/html/search/index.txt. This file seems to be (re)generated from the CONTENTS files for each library every time a package is installed or help.start function is called with update=TRUE. So a simple solution is simply to edit the CONTENTS file changing hplot keyword to aplot. I suppose the choice of keywords is up the package author/maintainer. It seems like in the case of rug it was just a simple mistake. Sorry for a longish post about such a trivial matter. The more I work with R the more amazed I am how well things are thought out. I just wanted to share this with the group. Andy __________________________________ Andy Jaworski Engineering Systems Technology Center 3M Center, 518-1-01 St. Paul, MN 55144-1000 ----- E-mail: apjaworski at mmm.com Tel: (651) 733-6092 Fax: (651) 736-3122 -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._
apjaworski at mmm.com writes: [rug() has "hplot" keyword]> I suppose the choice of keywords is up the package author/maintainer. It > seems like in the case of rug it was just a simple mistake. > > Sorry for a longish post about such a trivial matter. The more I work with > R the more amazed I am how well things are thought out. I just wanted to > share this with the group.Changed to "aplot" in the development version. -- O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard Blegdamsvej 3 c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics 2200 Cph. N (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918 ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk) FAX: (+45) 35327907 -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._
Hola! I agree with all the nice words of the original poster. When teaching R I am mentioning the help system, and in particular, help.search(), in the first class. I say that nobody should expect to remember 1509 names (which is the number of objects in base , as reported by length(ls(pos=6)) on my system rigth now). So knowing to use the online documentation is integral to using R. But:> help.search("kendal")No help files found with alias or title matching `kendal'> help.search("spearman")No help files found with alias or title matching `spearman' Happily I found what i searched by ?cor.test before starting to program myself. So help.search() could be even better. I understand it is a time issue, also. Kjetil Halvorsen -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._