From Robert.McGehee at geodecapital.com  Mon May 22 18:49:04 2006
From: Robert.McGehee at geodecapital.com (McGehee, Robert)
Date: Mon, 22 May 2006 12:49:04 -0400
Subject: [Rd] Wishlist: Vignettes on CRAN
Message-ID: <67DCA285A2D7754280D3B8E88EB548020C946838@MSGBOSCLB2WIN.DMN1.FMR.COM>

I was recently browsing through CRAN's Finance task view to remind
myself of the publicly available packages relevant to my work. As the
reference manuals are all online, I am able to flip through the
available functions to get an idea of the package's scope before
downloading. 

That said, many authors have taken the time to additionally provide a
useful vignette which provides a better overview to complicated
packages. However, as far as I can tell, the only way to read or even
know if a package has a vignette is to first download and unpack the
package source, which is inconvenient when one wants to understand a
package _before_ installing.

Perhaps an easy way to make vignettes more accessible to the end user
would be to link the vignette PDF directly to the download page so that
one could download it just as one can download the reference manual or
package source. This both publicizes the vignette (since many users may
even be unaware that a package has a vignette) and facilitates browsing.

Just a thought!

Best,
Robert

Robert McGehee
Quantitative Analyst
Geode Capital Management, LLC
53 State Street, 5th Floor | Boston, MA | 02109
Tel: 617/392-8396    Fax:617/476-6389
mailto:robert.mcgehee at geodecapital.com



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[Rd] Wishlist: Vignettes on CRAN
McGehee, Robert