CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rrstudio
NickCHK
NickCHK

Reputation: 1233

How can I preview .Rd documentation files in R?

I would like to be able to open up an .Rd documentation file and preview it in R.

For example, I can create a data documentation file using promptData:

df <- data.frame(var1=1:5,var2=6:10)
promptData(df,filename = "df_doc.Rd")

which will produce a documentation file "df_doc.Rd" in the working directory.

In order to preview this file, I can open it up in the RStudio editor and then hit "Preview", which will open up df_doc properly formatted in the Help window. However, I'd like to be able to do that with code rather than having to open up the file and hit the Preview button in the RStudio GUI. Something like a preview("df_doc.Rd") function.

I'm aware that there are ways to 'install' the documentation files so R knows where to find them. But I'm writing some code that will generate these files automatically and preview them (hopefully without having to load in the dev tools that install the documentation files), so I'm specifically hoping to be able to preview these directly from file. Is that possible?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2223

Answers (2)

NickCHK
NickCHK

Reputation: 1233

Man, the documentation for this one was pretty well hidden! To be fair, "Rd" isn't exactly Googleable, nor is documentation about documentation. But I managed to scrounge it up.

What I've been looking for is the

rstudioapi::previewRd('df_doc.Rd')

command in the rstudioapi library. Unfortunately, this only works in RStudio, so if I want it to be generally usable I'll need to write HTML directly instead of Rd and open that in a browser.

Upvotes: 4

Peter
Peter

Reputation: 223

According to 'Writing R Extensions', run:

R CMD Rdconv -t html filename.Rd > filename.html

in the command line. See also:

R CMD Rd2pdf --help

In R: system("R CMD Rdconv -t html filename.Rd > filename.html | chromium-browser")

Upvotes: 2

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