Help in 2.10 lost its "Find" feature

[Daniel Murphy-2]

Sirs:

I understand that no one wanted to maintain the old Help, but one feature I
used extensively -- as a newbie to R or to an unfamiliar package -- was the
capability of searching for a word or phrase on the Help page itself.
Ctrl-F/Command-F (Windows/mac) 'differently-phrased-capability' was a fast
way to find out how to specify the arguments for a function call to
accommodate a "capability" phrased differently than could be found in the
author's designed argument list, especially for long and informative Help's.
If new-Help could easily be enhanced to resurrect that feature, I believe
many users would appreciate it. Thanks.

Dan Murphy

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[hadley wickham]

> I understand that no one wanted to maintain the old Help, but one feature I
> used extensively -- as a newbie to R or to an unfamiliar package -- was the
> capability of searching for a word or phrase on the Help page itself.
> Ctrl-F/Command-F (Windows/mac) 'differently-phrased-capability' was a fast
> way to find out how to specify the arguments for a function call to
> accommodate a "capability" phrased differently than could be found in the
> author's designed argument list, especially for long and informative Help's.
> If new-Help could easily be enhanced to resurrect that feature, I believe
> many users would appreciate it. Thanks.

Most browsers offer this feature - it certainly works in safari and
firefox, and I'm sure in internet explorer too.

Hadley

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[Henrik Bengtsson]

For the text based help, there is no search feature on Windows, e.g.

options(help_type="text");
help(readLines);

but if you use the HTML-based help, you can use the browser's search
features as suggested/wanted:

options(help_type="html");
help(readLines);

/Henrik


On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 5:40 PM, hadley wickham <[hidden email]> wrote:

>> I understand that no one wanted to maintain the old Help, but one feature I
>> used extensively -- as a newbie to R or to an unfamiliar package -- was the
>> capability of searching for a word or phrase on the Help page itself.
>> Ctrl-F/Command-F (Windows/mac) 'differently-phrased-capability' was a fast
>> way to find out how to specify the arguments for a function call to
>> accommodate a "capability" phrased differently than could be found in the
>> author's designed argument list, especially for long and informative Help's.
>> If new-Help could easily be enhanced to resurrect that feature, I believe
>> many users would appreciate it. Thanks.
>
> Most browsers offer this feature - it certainly works in safari and
> firefox, and I'm sure in internet explorer too.
>
> Hadley
>
> --
> http://had.co.nz/
>
> ______________________________________________
> [hidden email] mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

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[Daniel Murphy-2]

That did it. Was having trouble searching 'help' for how to optionally
configure 'help'. Thanks.
-Dan

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 8:57 AM, Henrik Bengtsson <[hidden email]>wrote:

> For the text based help, there is no search feature on Windows, e.g.
>
> options(help_type="text");
> help(readLines);
>
> but if you use the HTML-based help, you can use the browser's search
> features as suggested/wanted:
>
> options(help_type="html");
> help(readLines);
>
> /Henrik
>
>
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 5:40 PM, hadley wickham <[hidden email]>
> wrote:
> >> I understand that no one wanted to maintain the old Help, but one
> feature I
> >> used extensively -- as a newbie to R or to an unfamiliar package -- was
> the
> >> capability of searching for a word or phrase on the Help page itself.
> >> Ctrl-F/Command-F (Windows/mac) 'differently-phrased-capability' was a
> fast
> >> way to find out how to specify the arguments for a function call to
> >> accommodate a "capability" phrased differently than could be found in
> the
> >> author's designed argument list, especially for long and informative
> Help's.
> >> If new-Help could easily be enhanced to resurrect that feature, I
> believe
> >> many users would appreciate it. Thanks.
> >
> > Most browsers offer this feature - it certainly works in safari and
> > firefox, and I'm sure in internet explorer too.
> >
> > Hadley
> >
> > --
> > http://had.co.nz/
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > [hidden email] mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >
>

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[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11/11/2009 11:40 AM, hadley wickham wrote:

>> I understand that no one wanted to maintain the old Help, but one feature I
>> used extensively -- as a newbie to R or to an unfamiliar package -- was the
>> capability of searching for a word or phrase on the Help page itself.
>> Ctrl-F/Command-F (Windows/mac) 'differently-phrased-capability' was a fast
>> way to find out how to specify the arguments for a function call to
>> accommodate a "capability" phrased differently than could be found in the
>> author's designed argument list, especially for long and informative Help's.
>> If new-Help could easily be enhanced to resurrect that feature, I believe
>> many users would appreciate it. Thanks.
>
> Most browsers offer this feature - it certainly works in safari and
> firefox, and I'm sure in internet explorer too.

I think Daniel was talking about the full text search of all pages.
This index for this was built by the Microsoft Help Compiler so it was
available in CHM help; the Mac has the full text search available in
lots of places, so it worked there just because the system automatically
indexed the static HTML pages.

I think it would be nice to get this back and make it less platform
specific.  It would need indexing of the content of the pages, and
Javascript or similar to access the indices.

Duncan Murdoch

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[hadley wickham]

> I think it would be nice to get this back and make it less platform
> specific.  It would need indexing of the content of the pages, and
> Javascript or similar to access the indices.

It would be nice to have an interface to something like lucene - would
be useful for other projects apart from R help.

Hadley


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