spatstat help

where to find help

There is a Quick Reference Guide for spatstat which summarises its capabilities and gives a comprehensive list of spatstat commands. To view the Quick Reference guide directly from R, load spatstat and type help(spatstat). Alternatively open the full spatstat package manual in a browser, and navigate to the first entry in the manual.

For information about a particular function in spatstat, either follow the links in the Quick Reference guide, or type help(functionname). The keyword search function help.search can be narrowed to the spatstat package:

help.search("systematic", package="spatstat")

will tell you the spatstat function to use for generating ``systematic’’ random point patterns.

Users of spatstat are strongly urged to read the online help files for the package. Substantial effort has gone into writing clear, detailed and comprehensive explanations of important concepts. Indeed several of the spatstat help files have been plagiarised in scientific publications. The spatstat online help files also include very practical guidance, warnings, and explanations of common error messages.

The spatstat package is constantly evolving. Regular users of spatstat can stay up-to-date by typing latest.news to read about changes in the most recent version of spatstat, or news(package="spatstat") to read about changes in all previous versions. The package news is also available at the news page, where you can sign up for notifications about new releases via RSS.

Several introductory ``vignettes’’ are installed with spatstat. They include a quickstart guide Getting Started with Spatstat, a document about Handling shapefiles and a document summarising recent updates. To see a list of all available vignettes, type (in the R command line interface) vignette(); the list of spatstat vignettes is given by vignette(package="spatstat"). To read a vignette, type vignette('name') where name is the name of the document without the file extension, e.g. vignette("getstart"). Vignettes can also be accessed using the graphical help interface invoked by help.start().

Several demonstration scripts are also installed with spatstat. Type

demo(package=spatstat)

for a list of all available demonstrations, or demo(spatstat) for a general overview.

Forums for questions

Questions about spatstat are often posted on the stackexchange.com forum (with the spatstat tag). You may find that a similar question has already been answered: check the old questions and answers under the spatstat tag on stackoverflow.com.

The email forum R-sig-geo sometimes handles questions about spatstat. General questions about R which are not spatstat-specific (and not specific to some other contributed package) can be addressed to the R-help forum. Join these or other fora by visiting r-project.org.

You can also email the spatstat authors directly: load spatstat and type ?spatstat to see the authors’ email addresses.

Bugs in spatstat

If you have identified a bug or problem in spatstat, please post a report to the bug reports page at github.com/spatstat/spatstat. You will need to supply an example of the problem, and the example should be reproducible.

You can also email the spatstat authors directly: load spatstat and type ?spatstat to see the authors’ email addresses.