This project aims to create a coherent collection of R packages that provide an interface to the Qt application and UI framework, with a focus on enabling GUI development and advanced graphics.
The project is in an early development stage, and there is no
documentation yet. However, it should be possible to install the
packages (from source) in the usual way (R CMD INSTALL
or install.packages()) on Linux or Mac OS X provided you
have installed the Qt libraries and development packages (Qt 4.5 or
better). For example,
install.packages(c("qtdevice", "qtpaint", "mosaiq"),
repos = "http://r-forge.r-project.org")
If you have multiple versions of Qt installed, make sure
the QMAKE environment variable points to the
correct qmake executable (check $QMAKE
--version).
The project summary page can be found here.
Qt comes with a standalone application called Qt Assistant, an advanced HTML help browser with an excellent user interface and powerful features such as keyword indexing and full-text search, that is used to display Qt documentation. Assistant is designed to be used with third-party documentation as well, but such use requires all relevant files to be registered and compiled into a binary collection beforehand.
R has a slightly different documentation model: it makes documentation available dynamically, depending on the packages currently in use. Even more dynamic documentation is planned for future versions, where documentation may be generated on-the-fly during a running R session. This model is incompatible with Qt's model of static documentation.
Having said that, most R sessions do not involve installing new packages, and it is a good compromise to have static versions of documentation for all installed packages available with a superior interface. The file rassistant.R provides tools to register and compile (and optionally run) currently available R HTML documentation into a form suitable for Qt Assistant. To use it on Linux/UNIX, type the following on the R command line:
source("http://qtinterfaces.r-forge.r-project.org/rassistant.R")
generateCompiledHelpUnix()
generateCompiledCollection(start.assistant = TRUE)
On the first run, this will produce a compiled help file
rproject.qch and a compiled collection file
rproject.qhc in the user's home directory (the first step
may take a while to run), and open it with Assistant. The files are
actually self-contained, and may be moved to other systems and used
with Assistant as a standalone help collection.
In subsequent sessions, just running
source("http://qtinterfaces.r-forge.r-project.org/rassistant.R")
generateCompiledCollection(start.assistant = TRUE)
should start Assistant without regenerating the help file. On UNIX
systems, Assistant can be run as a standalone application from the
command line using
$ assistant -collectionFile ~/rproject.qhc(the location is customizable).