[R] metafor package: changing decimal in forest plot to midline decimal

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 07/07/2014 12:02, Michael Dewey wrote:
> At 09:08 07/07/2014, Dietlinde Schmidt wrote:
>> Thanks for that link, Wolfgang. Unfortunately, there comes the Warning
>> with it:
>> "(process:3634): Pango-WARNING **: Invalid UTF-8 string passed to
>> pango_layout_set_text()"
>> and decimal being "scrambled" in forest plot and not displaying the
>> midline decimal.
>>
>> I think it has to do with the fact, that only 1-byte-codes are allowed
>> for options(OutDec="\xB7").
>> Or does it have to do with me using Ubuntu?
>
> I am not an expert on encodings but I think that in Unicode it is indeed
> two bytes but for some reason in the encoding used in Windows it is a
> single byte. It may be that some expert in encodings can tell you how to
> temporarily reset your locale in Ubuntu but I am not that expert.

All non-ASCII chars are two or more bytes in UTF-8: this one is c2 b7 in 
hex.

Ubuntu is based on Debian which micro-packages its encoding support.  On 
a standard Linux system you can just use (e.g.) LC_CTYPE=de_DE which is 
encoded in Latin-1.   That might not be installed on Debian/Ubuntu, in 
which case you need to install it.

OutDec is designed for outputting numbers in an internationalized way: 
no known locale uses a centred dot.  (If one did, you could most likely 
set LC_NUMERIC to such a locale instead.)

>
>
>> Apart from that the options-command does not seem to change the
>> decimal of values on the "true" x-axis under the plot.
>>
>> Still searching for a solution.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Linde
>>
>> Am 05.07.2014 19:06, schrieb Viechtbauer Wolfgang (STAT):
>>> I found this:
>>>
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2012-August/321057.html
>>>
>>> So, use this before drawing the forest plot:
>>>
>>> options(OutDec="\xB7")
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> Wolfgang
>>>
>>> --
>>> Wolfgang Viechtbauer, Ph.D., Statistician
>>> Department of Psychiatry and Psychology
>>> School for Mental Health and Neuroscience
>>> Faculty of Health, Medicine, and Life Sciences
>>> Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616 (VIJV1)
>>> 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands
>>> +31 (43) 388-4170 | http://www.wvbauer.com
>>> ________________________________________
>>> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On
>>> Behalf Of Dietlinde Schmidt [schmidt.dietlinde at web.de]
>>> Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2014 3:07 PM
>>> To: r-help at r-project.org
>>> Subject: [R] metafor package: changing decimal in forest plot to
>>> midline        decimal
>>>
>>> Dear R-Community,
>>>
>>> I need to change the punctuation of the reported weights, effect sizes
>>> and confidence intervals in a forest plot created with the
>>> forest()-function in the metafor-package.
>>>
>>> Midline decimal means that it looks like this (23·6) rather than that
>>> (23.6).
>>>
>>> Do I need to change the forest()-function and if yes which part exactly?
>>> Or is there an otherway how I can do it maybe by changing the
>>> rma()-function, of which the forest()-function is then applied to?
>>>
>>> Thanks for any hints and tipps!
>>>
>>> Cheers, Linde
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>>
>
> Michael Dewey
> info at aghmed.fsnet.co.uk
> http://www.aghmed.fsnet.co.uk/home.html
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.


-- 
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