Thank Dr. Ripley.

 When I read the instructions
" If the DESCRIPTION file is not entirely in ASCII it should contain an ‘
Encoding’ field specifying an encoding. This is used as the encoding of the
DESCRIPTION file itself and of the R and NAMESPACE files, and as the
default encoding of .Rd files.  "

I assumed that I should specify an encoding of UTF-8 in the description
file to handle the specific Rd files that were having problems.

After I removed  the encoding field (UTF-8)  I had added to the DESCRIPTION
file, the following error no longer occurred

"  Package inputenc Error: Keyboard character used is undefined
(inputenc)                in inputencoding `utf8'. "

however the rd files still had errors.

   looking at the latex versions of the Rd files I was able to spot which
characters in the Rd files
were offending. In my normal editor they were simply not showing up, so I
had no idea what characters were
causing the problem.

The only thing I am left with is the entries in the data frame. The package
came with some predefined  .rda files
in its data subdirectory.  Using encoding() on  the column of the data
frame that contains the following items

 checking data for non-ASCII characters ... WARNING
   Warning: found non-ASCII string(s)
   'Tourbihre de la Rivihre-aux-Feu' in object 'modpoll'
   'Lac ` la Fourche' in object 'modpoll'
   'Lac ` la Loutre' in object 'modpoll'
   'Lac Kinogami' in object 'modpoll'

I get "unknown"  for all the items.  So, If I understand you I should take
this dataframe, change the encoding
to UTF-8

Sorry for being so dense

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 1:46 PM, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk>wrote:

> On 24/07/2012 21:08, steven mosher wrote:
>
>> Well, I'm working on project trying to bring back an old package last
>> published on R 1.9 back to life.
>> I'm almost there but I am getting killed by an encoding error in the Rd
>> files
>>
>> After reading the manual, I decided to try UTF-8.  Mostly because I could
>> spell it. ha.
>>
>> That got me a bit closer but I still have these warnings
>>
>> * checking data for non-ASCII characters ... WARNING
>>    Warning: found non-ASCII string(s)
>>    'Tourbihre de la Rivihre-aux-Feu' in object 'modpoll'
>>    'Lac ` la Fourche' in object 'modpoll'
>>    'Lac ` la Loutre' in object 'modpoll'
>>    'Lac Kinogami' in object 'modpoll'
>>
>
> How to handle those is in 'Writing R Extensions': basically convert to
> UTF-8 and mark them as UTF-8.
>
>
>  * checking data for ASCII and uncompressed saves ... OK
>> * checking examples ... OK
>> * checking PDF version of manual ... WARNING
>> LaTeX errors when creating PDF version.
>> This typically indicates Rd problems.
>> LaTeX errors found:
>>   ! Package inputenc Error: Keyboard character used is undefined
>> (inputenc)                in inputencoding `utf8'.
>>
>> I'll keep searching the help list archives for a clue, but If somebody
>> could point me at educational material it's really time
>> that I learn this aspect.
>>
>
> Without the actual file we can do little.  The message means that
> something in the manual inputs (and it could be the DESCRIPTION file or an
> Rd file) contains a character not known to LaTeX.  Most likely it is simply
> not a UTF-8 character, but it could also be outside LaTeX's gamut.
>
> Normally the LaTeX log (which is in the check output) is more revealing:
> you can also try this part alone with R CMD Rd2pdf (and R CMD Rd2pdf
> --no-description often points the finger at the DESCRIPTION file).
>
>
>
>> I've read    http://developer.r-project.**org/Encodings_and_R.html<http://developer.r-project.org/Encodings_and_R.html>
>>
>> How do I figure out which encoding to use with the error seen above
>>
>
> Assuming this is not something esoteric, UTF-8 is the most comprehensive
> choice, but LaTeX's UTF-8 coverage (and that of the fonts used) is heavily
> biased to Western European scripts.  So for example for Lithuanian you may
> want to choose something else (Latin-7?).
>
>
>
>
> --
> Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
> Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~**ripley/<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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