Hi all, I'm looking at providing some nicer number formatting features for axes in ggplot2. One thing I would like to do is use thin spaces to separate digits, like you can in latex. I realise I can use unicode spaces to do this (e.g. http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/spaces.html), but what are the possible pitfalls. Is this likely to work on all graphics devices across all platforms? Thanks, Hadley
Thin spaces
4 messages · Hadley Wickham, Brian Ripley
On Sat, 11 Oct 2008, hadley wickham wrote:
Hi all, I'm looking at providing some nicer number formatting features for axes in ggplot2. One thing I would like to do is use thin spaces to separate digits, like you can in latex. I realise I can use unicode spaces to do this (e.g. http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/spaces.html), but what are the possible pitfalls. Is this likely to work on all graphics devices across all platforms?
Unlikely to work on most devices.
They are not supported in postscript() or pdf(): neither of their
underlying languages support Unicode, so they are restricted to basically
one human language.
windows(), quartz() and X11() support Unicode, but in the case of X11 the
fonts are often pretty incomplete so you need to check on the target
machine. A quick check on windows() suggests \u2009 is not in the
commonly used MS fonts (as your reference says).
All it needed was a very simple experiment to answer your question. Hint:
try
plot(1:10); text(4, 6, "1\u{2009}2")
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
On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 1:01 AM, Prof Brian Ripley
<ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
On Sat, 11 Oct 2008, hadley wickham wrote:
Hi all, I'm looking at providing some nicer number formatting features for axes in ggplot2. One thing I would like to do is use thin spaces to separate digits, like you can in latex. I realise I can use unicode spaces to do this (e.g. http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/spaces.html), but what are the possible pitfalls. Is this likely to work on all graphics devices across all platforms?
Unlikely to work on most devices.
Thanks for the information. I realise I could have tried the experiment you described, but that would have only told me it didn't work on the mac, and it wouldn't have told me if there was another way to achieve the same effect. I guess latex must vary the size of a standard space rather than using a special unicode space. This is probably not surprising given that latex considerably predates unicode. Thanks again for the help, Hadley
On Sun, 12 Oct 2008, hadley wickham wrote:
On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 1:01 AM, Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
On Sat, 11 Oct 2008, hadley wickham wrote:
Hi all, I'm looking at providing some nicer number formatting features for axes in ggplot2. One thing I would like to do is use thin spaces to separate digits, like you can in latex. I realise I can use unicode spaces to do this (e.g. http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/spaces.html), but what are the possible pitfalls. Is this likely to work on all graphics devices across all platforms?
Unlikely to work on most devices.
Thanks for the information. I realise I could have tried the experiment you described, but that would have only told me it didn't work on the mac, and it wouldn't have told me if there was another way to achieve the same effect. I guess latex must vary the size of a standard space rather than using a special unicode space. This is probably not surprising given that latex considerably predates unicode.
Yes, latex (more precisely TeX) sets words separately (and when kerning is involved, parts of words), with 'space' being converted into glue between boxes. Most other desktop-publishing programs do the same.
Thanks again for the help, Hadley -- http://had.co.nz/
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