[Rd] Re: [R] L10N and i18n of R

[Prof Brian Ripley]

First, please do not set Reply-To to R-help!  [I've moved the topic to 
R-devel.]

As has already been pointed out, R already handles many non-English 
languages, including all using ISO-Latin1 and many others with 8-bit 
character sets (where the devices support them: for example Adobe 
postscript fonts have limited support for Latin2).  Your `good news' is 
old news for all those languages.

I understand the problem with CJK is the larger character sets.  It is 
planned to support those by moving to Unicode internally, probably within 
the next year.  That will still leave the issues of getting text into and 
out of R in a specific localization, but should minimize the adaptations 
needed.


On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Shigeru Mase wrote:

> Dear R-users of non-English speaking countires.
> 
> Maybe a good news for those who want to use R in their
> local languages. Recently two Japanese, E. Nakama and
> M. Okada, succeeded in "making R speak Japanese". At
> present, R can handle Japanese (as well as other languages,
> I guess) character strings if one use consoles which
> can understand Japanese. Also P. Murrell kindly
> provided a facility to plot hundreads of Japaense
> characaters as graphical symbols (Hershey vector fonts).
> 
> Nakama and Okada's "L10N" (Localization) and "i18n"
> (internationalization) patches make it possible to
> use Japanese object names and to display Japanese
> characters on graphical devices (although still limited).
> If you are interested, please visit URL:
> 
> http://www.okada.jp.org/RWiki/index.php?%5B%5Bi18n_of_R%5D%5D
> 
> which is the only English page of RjpWiki, a Wiki-based
> collaboration site supported by Japanese R users.
> 
> Nakama's patches can also handle other languages
> than Japanese. He kindly built Korean and Russian
> version of R (1.7.1) as rpm binaries (although
> he can understand neither Korean nor Russian).
> 
> We are glad if these patches can give hints to R
> users who want to use local languages. Please note
> their patches are by no means complete and may
> potentially give your systems troubles. They and
> related binaries are offered without no warranty.
> Feedbacks and reports are welcome, but mere inquiries
> and complains not. Since the version up of R is so
> frequent, we cannot promise that these patches will
> be updated in future.
> 
> Yours
> ------------------------------------------------
> Shigeru Mase
> Dept. Math. and Comp. Sciences,
> Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> 

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595