[ESS] R-Xemacs ESS printing issue

[Frede Aakmann Tøgersen]

Coming in late in this discussion. Regarding the problem with a freezed R-graphics windows I occasionally see the same thing in Emacs and have seen that for several years. That means I have seen that for several versions of OS's (Windows), Emacs version and ESS versions. So no reason for shifting from Xemacs to Emacs ;-)

The problem is that the graphics windows from time to time freezes especially if I use the menus in the graphics windows but that if I do a carriage return in the ESS inferior buffer at the command line prompt of the rterm process the graphics get released and I can now proceed printing within a printing dialog windows that now shows up.

I'm no programmer and I'm not familiar with all the concepts in programming but I think that it has to do with a hanging event loop in the communication between the (X)Emacs comint process, the rterm process, and the children processes from rterm. I have tried to debug this in the ESS code but gave up since it is probably deep buried in the source code of R and/or Emacs (code for inferior processes in Emacs). 

I probably should submit a bug to Emacs developer or to the Emacs maillists but I'm not sure that I can describe the problem adequately enough in order to get some response.

Instead of printing and saving from the menus of the graphics windows I always use other devices in R such as pdf(), png (), bmp() and the likes (see help("Devices") in R).

Sorry for not being more helpful. 

Yours sincerely / Venlig hilsen
Frede Aakmann Tøgersen
Statistician, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Modeling, Statistics and Risk Analysis
Wind and Site Competence Centre
Technology R&D
T:  +45 9730 5135
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________________________________________
From: ess-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch [ess-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Mahesh Krishnan [heshriti at gmail.com]
Sent: 27 May 2009 20:45
To: maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: [ESS] R-Xemacs ESS printing issue

       [["bounced" to the proper list:  ESS-help -- MM ]]


Dear Martin,

I'm sorry if I got the wrong person, but I could not get an R-ESS email
list, so I decided to write to you.

      [[now you see: the correct list is ESS-help at ....]]

 I have a question regarding R. ESS and Xemacs. So I installed everything
according to John Fox' document, and everything works fine, except a couple
of very nagging problems.

For reference, I use windows XP, 32 bit, xemacs 21.4.21.

1) I cannot print from my graphics device. Even a simple command plot(1:10)
from R command within xemacs, opens up a plot in a new window. When I try to
print or save the graph, the whole thing hangs up. So I have to restart
xemacs +R.

2) The "help" files don't seem to work correctly in the text mode. It seems
to produce a source code like text. Equations and other formatting is not
done correctly. Ideally I'd like to view help pages in a separate window in
text format, sort of the typical R-IDE look would be great. So I can kill
the window once I'm done with the help.

Thanks again for your help. I appreciate your response,
Best Wishes,
Mahesh.

--
Mahesh Krishnan, Ph.D
heshriti at gmail.com

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