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

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> Naresh Gurbuxani 
>>>>>     on Sat, 6 Sep 2025 16:28:55 +0000 writes:

    > 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} 

thank you, Naresh, for trying and letting us know.

    > 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.

Yeah, .. you are not wrong.  Although, as mathematician by training,
I do very much like nicely rendered math formula, and in some of
my packages there *are* quite a few such formulas.

In any case, you *are* right that such a help.start() (or a
general ESS --> Emacs HTML browser) interface  would be nice and
useful to have.

Hence, (as I said already, see below) it would be nice if
someone sat down and wrote code enhancing ESS to do that.

Best,
Martin


    >> 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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    >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/ess-help