Hyperlinks to navigate between Vignettes?

While going through the vignettes in a start-to-finish or continuous manner, one thing that may pose a mild inconvenience is navigating amongst the vignettes in order, also given that the statements toward the end of those connected vignettes (.N - 1) mention continuity (as in saying '... in the next vignette ...'), and could do with links to the next one.

Since there are none, the only way for the reader to follow along (as far as I am aware of) is to either navigate back to the wiki page if following that, or back to here if following the documentation hosted on gitlab.io (and then from the 'Vignettes' dropdown, proceed to select the next one, going below one step at a time). This back-and-forth flow can be avoided.

And if not following those two starting points (highly unlikely, but could be possible), the specific order to sequentially follow among the connected vignettes is usually absent in the order they are enlisted by common commands (vignette(package="data.table"), browseVignettes("data.table"), tools::getVignetteInfo("data.table")[,3], etc.), which may be a tad confusing for beginners as to which one to jump to next (admittedly a rare case).

But again, navigating back one page and then hopping to the next one would only work assuming the reader began reading the vignette inside a browser in the first place, as going through the material within an R session (by say using vignette("datatable-intro", package="data.table”) inside RStudio) would invalidate this hyperlink to stay within, and move to the browser instead (perhaps this was a part of the rationale to not link?), although again there would be no direct way to navigate to the next vignette, and in this case even to go back to the 'Getting started' wiki or landing page for the gitlab.io hosted documentation.

Thus, I think it might be beneficial to include hyperlinks for at least transitioning between vignette chapters for user-friendliness.

order of vignettes on CRAN is alphabetical https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/

<html><body>
<!--StartFragment-->
Vignettes: | Benchmarking data.table Frequently asked questions Importing data.table Introduction to data.table Keys and fast binary search based subset Reference semantics Efficient reshaping using data.tables Using .SD for Data Analysis Secondary indices and auto indexing
-- | --


<!--EndFragment-->
</body>
</html>Vignettes: 	[Benchmarking data.table](https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/vignettes/datatable-benchmarking.html)
[Frequently asked questions](https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/vignettes/datatable-faq.html)
[Importing data.table](https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/vignettes/datatable-importing.html)
[Introduction to data.table](https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/vignettes/datatable-intro.html)
[Keys and fast binary search based subset](https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/vignettes/datatable-keys-fast-subset.html)
[Reference semantics](https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/vignettes/datatable-reference-semantics.html)
[Efficient reshaping using data.tables](https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/vignettes/datatable-reshape.html)
[Using .SD for Data Analysis](https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/vignettes/datatable-sd-usage.html)
[Secondary indices and auto indexing](https://cloud.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/vignettes/datatable-secondary-indices-and-auto-indexing.html)

we could consider numbering the vignettes, to make them appear in a specific order. just prefix vignette name with 01 02 etc

Numbering doesn't make sense because some are completely unrelated to each others. Better to just call them by the name rather than "next"/"previous".

"Soon", R will support arbitrary vignette ordering:

https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18576

The patch appears ready, it might be good to chime in & nudge that towards merge.

@MichaelChirico

@MichaelChirico question if that new feature will be backward compatible or will required to depends on R 4.4

@MichaelChirico

@MichaelChirico question if that new feature will be backward compatible or will required to depends on R 4.4

I guess you mean "is it an error to use this feature with an older version of R", I think worth asking in bugzilla.

so propagate also here the translation label from #6373

link value/format in standalone documents

As long as we stay in github or any cloned configuration vignettes can be bound using the directory tree but for standalone document such as an html generated by knitr or a pdf and sent in an email, there is no guarantee that the included links will still be active in the document at destination. This works for external URL leading to consider inter vignettes links as external ones (... referenced according to github repository).

Vignettes are not standalone html. Using external links pointing to github will result bad linking for any non-github matching version of a package (installed from CRAN or a branch). Links have to be relative in vignettes.

@pizzadogsquared

Hello!

I'm interested in taking on this issue with @pizzadogsquared. It will be our first contribution to this repo, and it seems like a good first issue to warm up to the code base. I'm newer to OSS, so I'm not fully accustomed to the formalities of this process, but could a maintainer assign this issue to us to avoid duplicate work?

Sincerely, Hunter Beach

Consider the "intro" vignette. It can be read on CRAN [1], on the website [2], or using browseVignettes('data.table'). In all three cases, I can scroll to the bottom and click on the relative link to the next vignette (reference semantics). At the top of the next vignette there's again a relative link to the "intro" vignette. Translations are a bit harder because they technically aren't vignettes and only exist on the website, but relative links between them also seem to work. I suppose we could double-check to ensure that all vignettes that should be linked into a chain are part of that chain, and then this issue could be closed as complete. [1] https://cran.r-project.org/package=data.table/vignettes/datatable-intro.html [2] https://r-datatable.com/articles/datatable-intro.html

@pizzadogsquared

Sounds like a good plan @pizzadogsquared and I will get on double checking : )

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Hyperlinks to navigate between Vignettes? #5833

link value/format in standalone documents

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Hyperlinks to navigate between Vignettes? #5833

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tdhock commented on Dec 18, 2023

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link value/format in standalone documents

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