R_PAPERSIZE and LC_PAPER

Thu, Apr 20, 2006 9:05 PM

On Thu, 2006-04-20 at 20:56 +0100, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

OK...so as I surmised below, R_PAPERSIZE_DEFAULT is part of the proposed
change. Makes sense.

BTW, on my FC4 system:

$ locale -ck LC_PAPER
LC_PAPER
height=279
width=216
paper-codeset="UTF-8"


However, as I note below LC_ALL is unset:

$ locale -ck LC_ALL
$


Googling seems to be somewhat inconclusive as to the default use of
LC_ALL, but it is clearly used/set in some locales and by some
applications.

However, the official POSIX definition is:

LC_ALL
        This variable shall determine the values for all locale
        categories. The value of the LC_ALL environment variable has
        precedence over any of the other environment variables starting
        with LC_ ( LC_COLLATE , LC_CTYPE , LC_MESSAGES , LC_MONETARY ,
        LC_NUMERIC , LC_TIME ) and the LANG environment variable.
        
Consistent with some comments that I found, it seems to suggest that
LC_ALL can serve as something of an override relative to the other LC_*
variables.

This position would support an argument that if set, it would override
the logic below as a system default, perhaps and unless R_PAPERSIZE is
set in the site or user profile.

Thus, a possible hierarchy of precedence from high to low might be:

R_PAPERSIZE
LC_ALL
LC_PAPER
R_PAPERSIZE_DEFAULT


Thoughts?

Regards,

Marc

On Thu, 2006-04-20 at 14:44 -0400, Roger D. Peng wrote:

Papersize can be set at compile time in the 'config.site' file (R_PAPERSIZE).

-roger

Marc Schwartz (via MN) wrote:

Prof. Ripley,

Happy to help.

So, it sounds like we are thinking along the same lines then.

A couple of follow up questions:

1. Is R_PAPERSIZE_DEFAULT to be the proposed new compile time setting in
2.4.0? Unless I missed it, I did not see it documented anywhere (ie.
R-admin/NEWS for 2.2.1 patched or 2.3.0 devel) and it is not in the
configure related files that I have here.

2. For LC_ALL, it is not set (at least on my FC4 system, have not had
the time yet to go to FC5) in en_US.UTF-8. Is it set in other locales
such that it would be of value?


Thanks also for the pointer to the devel guidelines. I had read through
them at some point in the past, but it has been a while.

Regards,

Marc

On Thu, 2006-04-20 at 18:48 +0100, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

Marc,

Thanks for the comments.  The 2.3.x series is in feature freeze, and
although a few features do break though for patch releases, they had
better be `badly needed' see
http://developer.r-project.org/devel-guidelines.txt).

So I was thinking of 2.4.0.

My suggestion was going to be along the lines of

local({
papersize <- as.vector(Sys.getenv("R_PAPERSIZE"))
if(!nchar(papersize)) {
     lcpaper <- Sys.getlocale("LC_PAPER")
     if(nchar(lcpaper))
         papersize <- if(length(grep(, lcpaper)) > 0) "letter" else "a4"
     else papersize <- as.vector(Sys.getenv("R_PAPERSIZE_DEFAULT"))
}
options(papersize = papersize)
})

This is unchanged if LC_PAPER is unset.  For those with LC_PAPER set,
its value takes precedence over the compile-time default.  That's almost
exactly equivalent to what happens on Windows (which sets LC_MONETARY for
this purpose, as LC_PAPER is not a locale category there).

Now, one could argue that if LC_PAPER is unset it should default to
LC_ALL, but I think is less desirable.

Of course, at present Sys.getlocale("LC_PAPER") is not supported, so
that's part of the TODO.

Brian

<SNIP>

R_PAPERSIZE and LC_PAPER

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