[R-SIG-Mac] minor problems with R 2.1 or recent R gui

[Denis Chabot]

Hi,

I just got today's latest official release for Mac and I really like  
the small function syntax helper that appears at the bottom of the  
console window, thanks for the innovation, Stefano, Simon and whoever  
else helped. I also really like the unicode support in R 2.1. Gone  
are the problems with accented vowels, which I only succeeded to get  
some of the time before.

One small thing: in preferences there is an item called "console" but  
it is a bit of a deceiving title because if you change background  
color or transparency there, it does not just affect the console but  
also the editor windows.

Finally, I have a few questions. Since I switched to R 2.1 from 2.0  
some error messages have started happening. I think these relate to  
R, not to the gui, but I'm not sure because the gui changed at the  
same time.

My work has been pretty focused at trying to make maps in the last  
week, so I'm not sure if these error messages are restricted to this.

If I type this in the console:

library(PBSmapping)
data(worldLLhigh)
plotMap(worldLLhigh)

I get this after the last command:

 > plotMap(worldLLhigh)
2005-05-14 17:57:51.781 R[634] -[NSBigMutableString  
replaceCharactersInRange:withString:] called with nil argument. For  
apps linked on Tiger this will raise an exception. For earlier apps  
it will produce this one-time warning and continue with existing  
behavior (which is undefined).
Warning message:
gamma cannot be modified on this device in: par(args)
 >

The error message starting with "2005" and ending with "undefined)."  
shows up in red on my screen, and is the only kind of message in red  
I remember seeing on my console (default color settings). It happens  
almost every day now. And yes I also switched to Tiger about 1.5  
weeks ago.

As for the warning message about gamma, I get this many times a  
session when using Quartz graphics.

This brings a few more questions. In quartz graphics, I can plot text  
containing characters like the dagger (using the caracter palette to  
paste it into the text I want to plot). But when using pdf graphics,  
I get a dot (period) instead of the dagger.

On the other hand, if I put text containing superscript on a plot,  
like this:
text(y=47.5,x=-51.5, expression(0.04^b), cex=0.8)  # St. John's, Sick  
1965

the output is nice in pdf but in quartz, the superscript is way too  
far above the main text. I keep getting small differences between  
quartz and pdf, is there a compendium of known differences I could  
consult?

Thanks in advance,

Denis Chabot