[R-SIG-Mac] Unicode characters in script?

[Michael Hoban]

In my first posting, I didn't know there were two different graphics
output mechanisms at work. In my second, I had found that out. The
same code in two places uses different back-ends, and produces
different output results, and it was by no means immediately apparent
that that's the case. I meant no slight against Rscript itself or by
extension its author. In all of the documentation I read, there was
nothing that explicitly said that the figures produced by R.app were
fundamentally different from those generated from the command line
(especially as the default format for saving from R.app figures is
pdf). Also, if I generate the figure from within R.app and save it as
a PDF, it "just works," further leading me to assume it should "just
work" from the command line. Sorry for the confusion.




On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 11:23 PM, Prof Brian Ripley
<ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Aug 2011, Simon Urbanek wrote:
>
>>
>> On Aug 11, 2011, at 2:35 PM, Michael Hoban wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all-
>>>
>>> I tried searching before posting, but this is one of those tricky
>>> questions to search for. My issue is this: within the R.app gui, I can
>>> use extended characters in plot labels without any issue (specifically
>>> in my case the ∂, lowercase delta), for example:
>>>
>>>> plot(c(1:10) ~ c(1:10), main="∂foobie bletchƒ")
>>>
>>> However, when I try to do the same in a script from the terminal
>>> (interpreted by Rscript), I get a bunch of errors related to character
>>> encoding:
>>>  ....
>>>  conversion failure on '∂foobie bletchƒ' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot
>>> substituted for <e2>
>>>  ....
>>>
>>> Is there a way to make this work? Or is Rscript not equipped to handle
>>> multibyte characters?
>>>
>>
>> It seems your'e running Rscript in a locale that doesn't support unicode
>> (probably C). Make sure you use UTF-8 locale (e.g. LANG=en_US.UTF-8)
>
> Maybe: but because he blatently ignored the posting guide, we don't know.
>
> Another possibility is that he is using a graphics device that does not
> support those characters (and again, we have not been told).
>
> Using Greek characters requires the postscript() and pdf() devices to be
> told to work in Greek, as their help pages (and the R manuals) makes clear.
>  It is those graphics languages (and not Rscript) which do not support
> Unicode.  You will also need viewers that support the Greek characters ....
>
>
> --
> 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