R-alpha: ISO Latin1 and Readline
Martin Maechler
Martin Maechler <maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch>
Fri, 13 Jun 1997 14:43:50 +0200
One thing which is important is
to use the environment variable
LC_CTYPE=iso_8859_1
(This makes Emacs automatically call (standard-display-european 1)
Here, the readline library is not of much importance, because
1) We use US-american keyboards
which makes programming / latex / Splus much easier.
2) In Emacs, we use a nice package
(require 'iso-transl)
and
(iso-transl-set-language "German")
which makes C-x 8 and more imporantly
'Alt' (the one besides "Meta" on a SPARC keyboard)
behave as a prefix for accented characters.
So, the German Umlauts are produced using
Alt-a (ä), ....Alt-U (Ü),
and even the one we don't use in Switzerland, Alt-s (ß)
Also, Alt-m (=) µ , Alt-< (=) «;
And for all accents:
Alt-accent-letter --> accented letter.
Alt-'-e -> é
Alt-^-i -> î
and so on -- this is much more powerful than any language specific
keyboard.
and then, we use S-mode / R-mode / latex-mode / shell-mode from within
Emacs.
------------
Back to R:
I think most important are
1) string constants
2) Comments
and then
3) text(.) and mtext(.) of these constants.
4) Variable names might come natural to some users,
especially the ones that come from non-Unix worlds.
------------------------------
Remark to '3)' and postscript(.).
In newer versions of S-plus (>= 3.1 I think),
there is the
ps.options (setfont = ps.setfont.latin1)
command which allows for ISO-latin1 text.
The big drawback is that the default plotting character is DIFFERENT
and worse.
If you want to see what I mean, execute the following and compare the 2
postscript files:
#### Deal with 'bug' :
#### if ps.options (setfont = ps.setfont.latin1)
#### has been called,
#### the default plotting character, the 'bullet' is drawn much too small.
pso <- ps.options (reset = T)
ps.options (setfont = ps.setfont.latin1)
postscript("latin1-ex.ps")
plot(1:10, main ="© by «Martin Mächler»")
Txt <- paste("ps.options (reset = T)",
"ps.options (setfont = ps.setfont.latin1)",
"plot(1:10, main = \"© by «Martin Mächler»\")",
"text(1,9,\"««__all this text__»»\")",sep="\n")
text(1,9,Txt, adj=0)
dev.off()
pso <- ps.options (reset = T)
postscript("std-ex.ps")
plot(1:10, main ="© by «Martin Mächler»")
text(1,9,"ps.options (reset = T)\nplot(1:10, main = \"....\")",adj=0)
dev.off()
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