Reference manuals in R

Every package on CRAN seems to provide a reference manual but in contrast to vignettes they do not seem to get downloaded or built when installing packages. Can this be done so that I can access them from the command line in R or can I only access them on CRAN?

Solution

From a given package's sources, you can build this via R CMD Rd2pdf:

edd@max:~$ R CMD Rd2pdf --help
Usage: R CMD Rd2pdf [options] files

Generate PDF output from the Rd sources specified by files, by
either giving the paths to the files, or the path to a directory with
the sources of a package, or an installed package.

Unless specified via option '--output', the basename of the output file
equals the basename of argument 'files' if this specifies a package
or a single file, and 'Rd2' otherwise.

The Rd sources are assumed to be ASCII unless they contain \encoding
declarations (which take priority) or --encoding is supplied or if using
package sources, if the package DESCRIPTION file has an Encoding field.
The output encoding defaults to the package encoding then to 'UTF-8'.

Files are listed in the order given: for a package they are in alphabetic
order of the \name sections.

Options:
  -h, --help            print short help message and exit
  -v, --version         print version info and exit
      --batch           no interaction
      --no-clean        do not remove created temporary files
      --no-preview      do not preview generated PDF file
      --encoding=enc    use 'enc' as the default input encoding
      --outputEncoding=outenc
                        use 'outenc' as the default output encoding
      --os=NAME         use OS subdir 'NAME' (unix or windows)
      --OS=NAME         the same as '--os'
  -o, --output=FILE     write output to FILE
      --force           overwrite output file if it exists
      --title=NAME      use NAME as the title of the document
      --no-index        do not index output
      --no-description  do not typeset the description of a package
      --internals       typeset 'internal' documentation (usually skipped)
      --build_dir=DIR   use DIR as the working directory

The output papersize is set by the environment variable R_PAPERSIZE.
The PDF previewer is set by the environment variable R_PDFVIEWER.

Report bugs at bugs.r-project.org .
edd@max:~$