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

[Naresh Gurbuxani]

In my emacs 30.1 on Mac, these formulas are not rendered.  They show as raw latex.  For example:

f_n(x) = \frac{1}{{2}^{n/2} \Gamma (n/2)} {x}^{n/2-1} {e}^{-x/2} 

The manual has only a few formulas.  In any case, when reading help files (C-c C-v), we text that is not ’nicely’ rendered, but very informative.


> On Sep 6, 2025, at 6:13 AM, Martin Maechler <maechler using stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
> 
>>>>>> 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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