helppdf function

help() Type="pdf" and View It

Utility to view PDF-rendered help pages; particularly useful in case they contain mathematical formulas or otherwise sophisticated formats.

helppdf(topic, viewer = getOption("pdfviewer"), quiet = !interactive(), ...)

Arguments

• topic: the topic, passed to help().
• viewer: a pdf viewer; the default is typically what you want interactively.
• quiet: logical indicating that nothing should be printed to the console and the result should be returned as invisible().
• ...: further optional arguments passed to help().

Returns

Returns the full path of the pdf file produced.

Author(s)

Martin Maechler

See Also

help, system.

Examples

if(interactive()) {
  ## Both calls work :
  helppdf(Normal)
  helppdf("NegBinomial")
} else if(.Platform$OS.type != "windows") { # batch mode (Windows often too slow for this)
  od <- setwd(tempdir())
  ff <- helppdf(Normal, viewer=NULL)
  stopifnot(file.exists(ff)) ; print(ff)
  setwd(od)# revert to previous dir.
}