[R] New problem printing °C in plots

[Peter Dalgaard]

Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> writes:

> yes. Patrick: it's really the case that recent versions of Linux
> and other OSes AFAIK really behave differently :  They default
> to set locales based on UTF-8 whereas before, often locales
> where based on iso-* (e.g. iso-8859-1 for "Western Europe"-like).
> 
> And even more problematically (if you want to stay back
> continuing to use iso-8859-x instead of UTF-8): Man pages and
> other files are delivered encoded in UTF-8 as well.
> So you are more or less urged to go along with the wave...

Yes. I don't think you do want to stay with the iso-8859-x, even
though it is going to be a pain to switch for those of us that have
masses of files (and file names!) written in 8bit encodings. 

In retrospect, the iso-8859 encodings (and IBM code pages too, for
that matter) were a huge mistake, precisely because they let you have
files in multiple non-ascii encodings without a way to specify which
one was used.

Those of us who have tried every encoding of our national alphabets
since ISO-646 (not to mention FIELDATA) are getting a bit tired of it
all, but there might be some hope that Unicode/UTF-8 is the end of our
troubles (unless Microsoft manages to screw everything up again
by their use of UTF-16...).

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907