UTF-8 and .Rd files

On Wed, 28 Jun 2006, Peter Dalgaard wrote:

Paul Gilbert <pgilbert at bank-banque-canada.ca> writes:

I've been following this thread hoping for the definitive answer...

Peter Dalgaard wrote:
....

Well, I do tend to think that we should just use utf, assuming that
people have the relevant glyphs. If they don't, then they might get
little hollow rectangles but so what?

Unfortunately, they might get nothing visible at all, and they might 
also get something completely wrong (happens on my Windows' X11 server 
on my laptop).  This is not an R problem but a question of the quality 
of implementation of UTF-8.  (Given the lack of UTF-8 fonts, I don't 
see the latter changing any time soon.)

My comments (at UseR and to G?ran) are intended to make people aware 
just how badly things can go wrong: it is up to the users to decide if 
transliteration is worse than the chance of mangling.

My problem is that I put an ? in a reference in an Rd file, and now my
builds fail on some of my systems. I can switch which systems work and
which are broken, but I can not get it to work on all systems. I have
spent way too much time trying to figure out what is wrong. So, wrt "so
what", I need to choose between checking my packages on all the
different systems I use, or having an ? in the Rd file. I think my
problem is more complicated than having the relevant glyphs. I suspect
it has to do with having the same locale on all systems doing NFS
mounts, or on my cvs server, or something strange like that.

Just to clarify, one thing is what I feel should be the longer term
strategy, another is what the R build tools can currently do...

Did you follow the advice to declare your input encoding with
\encoding and use \enc to provide a transliteration?

It is necessary to do so.  I use a mixture of UTF-8 and latin1 locales 
on systems sharing a file system, and it all works for me: iconv does 
the charset translations transparently provided it knows what to do.