[R] dvips function gives "Documents not found" error

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 27 Nov 2003, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 04:21:04PM -0800, David Kelly wrote:
> > Frank Harrell wrote:
> > 
> > > Did you make the changes I suggested (surrounding two items by
> > > dQuote())?
> > >
> > > Have you tried Linux?
> > ------------
> > No, I didn't make those changes because I've just been working with a 
> > binary distribution. I may go ahead and pull down sources and try; I was 
> 
> But that's the beauty of it -- even in Windoze, the $R_HOME/library/$FOO/R/
> directory for a package $FOO contains simple text code which you can edit.
> 
> If you know how to read and write S source code, I may take you only about
> one minute to locate the file, and insert the suggested dQuote().
> 
> > trying to avoid that.
> > 
> > I wish I were working with Linux, but I'm doing this work for someone 
> > with many installed PCs that want to use R, and they're all running 
> > Win2K and that isn't going to change.
> 
> If you organise your work environment wel, operating systems matter less and
> less. R, Perl, Python, ... are pretty much completely cross-platform (unless
> you insist on using OS-specific features). 

Well, it is sort of the latter.  Almost all current OSes allow spaces in 
paths, but only Windows users seem to make use of them.  Which is why 
early on I suggested that it would be good if Frank could ensure they are 
allowed in Hmisc.   However (and I don't know if this is the issue here)
there is the concept of `quoting hell' and quoting is certainly not even
cross-sh-clones on Unix-alike.  And since Dirk mentions Perl, the system() 
call in Perl does not even work the same on Windows 98 and 2000/XP, 
something R has always managed.

I will try over the weekend to track down exactly where the problem lies,
but only because it may help us to be offer some general guidelines.

-- 
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