From murdoch at stats.uwo.ca  Wed Nov 11 18:06:49 2009
From: murdoch at stats.uwo.ca (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:06:49 -0500
Subject: [Rd] Help in 2.10 lost its "Find" feature
In-Reply-To: <f8e6ff050911110840q8f11ebhe94c72cf014c4e28@mail.gmail.com>
References: <48f8cced0911110806x1196f9bejb6214b55d4e84bf3@mail.gmail.com>
	<f8e6ff050911110840q8f11ebhe94c72cf014c4e28@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4AFAEF29.3050406@stats.uwo.ca>

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



[Rd] Help in 2.10 lost its "Find" feature
Duncan Murdoch