Help System

DESCRIPTION:

Starts and controls the JavaHelp window system for help in S-PLUS. This system allows you to search for help files by topic and to display them. You can also put your own help files into the help system.

USAGE:

help.start(view = "TOC", visible = T)
help.off()
help.running()

OPTIONAL ARGUMENTS:

view
character string specifying the start-up tab for the left pane of the JavaHelp window. Allowable values are "TOC" (the default), "Index", and "Search".
visible
logical flag. If TRUE, the default, the help system is started and displayed on your screen when initialization is complete. If FALSE, the help system is started, but hidden, until you make it visible by another call to help.start.

SIDE EFFECTS:

help.start turns on the help system.

help.off turns off the help system.

DETAILS:

Start the help system with the command help.start() . The JavaHelp browser is an HTML help viewer with an intuitive user interface. The JavaHelp window contains two panes and a toolbar. The left pane has three tabs allowing you to view any of the following: a Table of Contents, an Index of topics, or a Full-Text Search facility. The right pane shows help text.

The toolbar contains buttons for Previous and Next files, and for printing and page setup.

You can copy and paste from the JavaHelp viewer by highlighting the desired text and pressing Ctrl-C to copy the appropriate text and using either Ctrl-V or your usual UNIX paste command in the Commands window.

JavaHelp does not currently let you search for text in a single help file. To do that, either copy the text of the file to your favorite text editor and search there, or turn JavaHelp off ( help.off()), and view help files using an html browser that lets you search; see the pager argument to help ) for some choices.

You can use the HELPSTART utility to start up an external S-PLUS JavaHelp viewer. By default, it allows viewing of help files for S-PLUS functions and datasets. Additionally, you can view help files for libraries, modules or your own S-PLUS chapters by specifying the full path to the Java helpset file(s) on the command line when invoking HELPSTART. See the examples below.

SEE ALSO:

, , , .

EXAMPLES:

# starting the help system
help.start() # now the JavaHelp window will appear

# creating your own help file for a function, and making a new
# JavaHelp help set with information about your new help file in it

myfunc <- function(x) x^2
prompt(myfunc)
!vi myfunc.sgml
!Splus HINSTALL .Data myfunc.sgml
!Splus BUILD_JHELP

# using the HELPSTART utility to view S-PLUS help files
Splus6 HELPSTART
# using the HELPSTART utility to view help files for the menu library
# and the Java GUI in addition to S-PLUS help files
# (NOTE: The Java GUI is deprecated in S-PLUS 8.1.)     
Splus6 HELPSTART `Splus6 SHOME`/library/menu/.Data/__Jhelp/menu.hs `Splus6 SHOME`/doc/help/guihelp/splus6unix.hs