[Rd] Warning under R 2.6.0: Rd files with unknown encoding

[Peter Dalgaard]

John Fox wrote:
> Dear Brian,
>
>   
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk] 
>> Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2007 7:45 AM
>> To: John Fox
>> Cc: r-devel at r-project.org
>> Subject: Re: [Rd] Warning under R 2.6.0: Rd files with 
>> unknown encoding
>>
>> On Tue, 12 Jun 2007, John Fox wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> Dear R-devel list members,
>>>
>>> Under the development version of R (2.6.0), I notice that my sem 
>>> package produces the following warning:
>>>
>>> 	checking Rd files ... WARNING
>>> 	Rd files with unknown encoding:
>>> 	residuals.Rd
>>>
>>> I wonder what the warning means. As far as I can see, 
>>>       
>> residuals.Rd is 
>>     
>>> similar to the other .Rd files in the package.
>>>
>>> At least for the time being, I won't reproduce residuals.Rd here in 
>>> the interest of brevity.
>>>       
>> You have in the \details of that file:
>>
>>      (s_{ij} - c_{ij})/[(c_{ii}c_{jj} - c_{ij}²)/N]^{1/2}}
>>
>> and that superscript 2 (which will probably come out in your 
>> mailer but not for all readers) is not ASCII.  'Writing R 
>> Extensions' tells you that for files that are not entirely 
>> ASCII you need to declare the encoding:
>> I presume you want \encoding{latin1}.
>>     
>
> Thanks for catching that. I wonder how it happened, since I believe that I
> produced the file with a plain-text editor, probably Tinn-R. 
>   
Several tools seem to be overly helpful in doing that conversion 
(x-caret-2 becomes x-superscript-2) these days. X11 keyboards without 
the nodeadkeys option does it if you forget a space after the caret, and 
Thunderbird does it when displaying emails, which is almost as annoying 
as the automatic smiley recognition (which has been said to "turn Perl 
scripts into love letters").