[R-pkg-devel] Math symbols in .Rd files

[Bert Gunter]

OS: Mac OSX Catalina
R Version 3.6.3
UTF-8 declared as Encoding in DESCRIPTION file

First, apologies: I'm nearly certain that this has been asked (many
times) before, and I think I know the answer. But I need to verify.

\eqn{...} allows me to insert a few math symbols in .Rd files, but
does not seem to work for symbols equivalent to unicode U+00B0 (degree
sign) and U+00B1 (plus minus sign). That is \eqn{\pm } is not rendered
properly, and there is no degree sign for Latex without adding
packages.  I can enter these as Mac symbols (presumably using UTF-8
encoding)  and they render properly on my machine in the installed
package documentation. But CRAN's winbuilder doesn't like them with
error message:

LaTeX errors found:
! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char ≤ (U+2264)
(inputenc)                not set up for use with LaTeX.

Are there any fixes/workarounds other than a fallback to plain text?

Thanks. Again, my apologies for asking this again, but I just wanted
to be sure my understanding is correct -- or find out where I'm
confused.

Bert Gunter