On Thu, Mar 27, 2003 at 05:19:25PM -0800, Thomas Lumley wrote: > On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote: > > > > > With all the problems using java-based search on Linux I was wondering > > why java was needed. Could this have been done more simply? I am not > > very knowledgeable about java so please forgive me if the answer is > > obvious. > > Well, the searching needs a search program to be run, triggered by > something you do in the browser. > > This requires either a program that can run in the browser (Java, as > JavaScript I don't think can handle this sort of thing) or requires some > way of calling R from the browser (even worse). > > Better solutions would seem to require either R doing the HTML rendering > or R running an HTTP server. Neither is out of the question, but it isn't > straightforward. Stata uses the former solution and I believe SAS uses > the latter. > > -thomas
I have just set up emacs to work with a text browser called w3m (using emacs-w3m). This is light and fast and displays webpages in an emacs buffer. It is surprisingly useful. I also have a little function that takes the output of help.search() and creates a webpage with hyperlinks and can therefore do a search that creates a webpage and then display the webpage in an emacs buffer. I have just start trying to cobble something together that combines these more formally and hope that I should be able to do something like M-x help-search, enter a search phrase and display the results as a webpage with links all in emacs/ESS/w3m. I don't have a clue about lisp (except that it seems to involve lots of brackets and has a considerable history) so this will is unlikely to move forward very fast. This does not provide all of the functionality of help.start() but might be a way of getting free of these java issues (for those happy to use emacs and ESS that is). I am doing this on linux, but w3m is also available for MS Windows. BTW just to push it I also used sweave(), xtable and latex2html together - it was quite interesting, although latex2html does not recognise the code environment - something else to tiniker with, perhaps. I haven't yet tried the html package that was announced here a short while ago, but the possibility of combining these as an alternative way of displaying output from R (esp. large tables?) could be fun to explore. Dave > > ______________________________________________ > [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list > https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help -- Dave Whiting Dar es Salaam, Tanzania ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
