[Rd] (PR#9201) Unable to save a plot containing Chinese (two-byte)

[ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk]

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On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, Pavel Stranak wrote:

> On 4.9.2006, at 21:16, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> 
> >Please can we have a full reproducible example, including the locales
> >used, and exactly how you 'saved' the plot?  (As we do ask.)

You have _still_ not told us what we asked, including the locales!

> I have used GUI command "File->Save As .." Im Mac GUI.

That may well not work, but reports on the Mac GUI are inappropriate for 
R-bugs.

> It works perfectly with the same plots, when I don't use Chinese.
> It also works fine, when I use Czech accented characters. At least some of
> them are also two-byte in UTF-8.

Yes, but Chinese chars are not.

> But the problem also occures when I direct pdf device right into the file:
> > pdf(file="Rplot.pdf")

Incorrect usage.

> > plot(1:20, 1:20, main="P?íli? ?lu?ou?ký k?? úp?l ?ábelské ódy.")
> # Czech accents work fine
> > plot(1:20, 1:20, main="?P?íli? ?lu?ou?ký k?? úp?l ?ábelské ódy.")
> Error in title(...) : conversion failure in 'mbcsToSbcs'
> # One Chinese character => Error
> 
> >
> >If Chinese characters are 'two-byte', then this likely will not work (but
> >at least European locales on MacOS X are UTF-8, so I expected Chinese ones
> >to be also).

> As far as I know, UTF-8 contains at least 1byte and 2byte characters.

and 3 byte and 4 byte chars, and potentially up to 6.

> All the chinese characters are represented by two bytes in UTF-8.

Please give your reference!  They are in the Unicode ranges from 2F00, and 
characters above 07Ff need 3 or more bytes in UTF-8.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html


> The characters I have used (but that fail to display in your bug-tracking
> system)
> are two characters "Chinese language".
> 
> My locales are set to UTF-8.

That is *not* a locale but a character encoding.

> I have not set any fonts in R because all the Chinese characters display fine
> both in the console and the plot.

But not in pdf, as you said.  You really have failed to read the 
references, including the help page and tutorial I very kindly pointed you 
to.

In case it has still not got through to you: PDF is not written in UTF-8 
and most fonts do not include Chinese ideographs, including Helvetica, the 
default font for PDF.

-- 
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
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