[Rd] UTF-8 and .Rd files

[Paul Gilbert]

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

> On Wed, 28 Jun 2006, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
>
>> Paul Gilbert <pgilbert at bank-banque-canada.ca> writes:
>>
>>> I've been following this thread hoping for the definitive answer...
>>>
>>> Peter Dalgaard wrote:
>>> ....
>>>
>>>> Well, I do tend to think that we should just use utf, assuming that
>>>> people have the relevant glyphs. If they don't, then they might get
>>>> little hollow rectangles but so what?
>>>
>
> Unfortunately, they might get nothing visible at all, and they might 
> also get something completely wrong (happens on my Windows' X11 server 
> on my laptop).  This is not an R problem but a question of the quality 
> of implementation of UTF-8.  (Given the lack of UTF-8 fonts, I don't 
> see the latter changing any time soon.)
>
> My comments (at UseR and to Göran) are intended to make people aware 
> just how badly things can go wrong: it is up to the users to decide if 
> transliteration is worse than the chance of mangling.
>
>>> My problem is that I put an ö in a reference in an Rd file, and now my
>>> builds fail on some of my systems. I can switch which systems work and
>>> which are broken, but I can not get it to work on all systems. I have
>>> spent way too much time trying to figure out what is wrong. So, wrt "so
>>> what", I need to choose between checking my packages on all the
>>> different systems I use, or having an ö in the Rd file. I think my
>>> problem is more complicated than having the relevant glyphs. I suspect
>>> it has to do with having the same locale on all systems doing NFS
>>> mounts, or on my cvs server, or something strange like that.
>>
>>
>> Just to clarify, one thing is what I feel should be the longer term
>> strategy, another is what the R build tools can currently do...
>>
>> Did you follow the advice to declare your input encoding with
>> \encoding and use \enc to provide a transliteration?
>
It has been several months since I did this, but I thought I had 
followed all the instructions.

>
> It is necessary to do so.  I use a mixture of UTF-8 and latin1 locales 
> on systems sharing a file system, and it all works for me: iconv does 
> the charset translations transparently provided it knows what to do.

Ok,   I will try again sometime when I have a bit more time.

Thanks,
Paul
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