[ESS] launch help.start() in EWW browser

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Naresh Gurbuxani via ESS-help 
>>>>>     on Fri, 5 Sep 2025 10:17:33 +0000 writes:

    > When running R in terminal emacs, what options are needed so that
    > help.start() opens EWW browser?

I forgot if we (ESS core developers) ever thought of providing
that;  I think "we" did, ..

Of course, this is a very reasonable feature request.

Note that in the last few years, R itself got capabilities to
get "full math" support on it's html help pages (where before
this was only possibly for the PDF (produced via LaTeX) help
manuals.

See e.g.  (the "dailys", updated daily for the R-devel version)
some of the help pages for the stats distributions, available here:
 https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/Distributions.html
e.g.
 https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/Normal.html
 https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/FDist.html
 https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/Chisquare.html

Do they show the math formula nicely in Eww?

.... even if not, I think we'd be happy
for  patches / pull requests to add these (webbrowsing R help
pages) for ESS.

Martin


    > To find location of manuals, I run

    > dir(paste0(Sys.getenv("R_HOME"), "/doc/manual", collapse = "/"))

    > Now in emacs I can do M-x eww-open-file

    > Thanks,
    > Naresh

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