[R-pkg-devel] ω, α, η, ² in .Rd files

[Jonathon Love]

hi duncan,
>> yup, although if the encoding of the comments in the .R files are
>> completely misunderstood by system, it shouldn't make any difference to
>> the resultant package. Or is there a way that it could interfere?
>
> Roxygen2 will take the comments and write out .Rd files.  Those files 
> need to be written in ASCII, or the declared encoding of the package, 
> not of the locale where Roxygen2 was run.  (R and CRAN know nothing 
> about Roxygen2, they just look at the Rd files as though they were 
> written by you.)
>
> So I think it should be possible for all of this to work:  If you 
> write your comments in UTF-8 and declare that as the encoding of the 
> package, then Roxygen2 should read the .R files as UTF-8 files, and 
> write out UTF-8 Rd files, regardless of the locale. But encodings of 
> strings go through several translations internally in R, so there may 
> be some step there that loses the original intent.  And Roxygen2 may 
> be just ignoring encodings, which would almost certainly go badly.

yup, this all works as you describe. the only wrinkle is that the CRAN 
checks on windows don't like non-ascii characters appearing in the .R 
files (which they would if one puts special chars in one's roxygen 
annotations).

cheers

jonathon