Fancy quotes on Windows
On 11/6/2009 11:30 AM, James W. MacDonald wrote:
Duncan Murdoch wrote:
On 11/6/2009 10:40 AM, James W. MacDonald wrote:
Hi, I don't use Windows as my primary OS anymore, so didn't notice this until recently. In R-2.10.0 under Windows useFancyQuotes is FALSE by default, but this doesn't seem to affect the rendering of (text) help pages. This is not a problem if I run via the Rgui or Rterm (via DOS prompt), as the help pages are rendered in a popup window that understands directional quotes. However, if I run under emacs/ESS, the help is rendered within emacs, which doesn't understand directional quotes, so any quoted text is surrounded by \221thetext\222, which is obviously difficult to read. Is there another setting that I am missing that affects the usage of directional quotes for the help pages?
I don't see this. Are you sure you haven't got a typo somewhere?
Pretty sure. I get the opposite: Loading required package: utils
> options("useFancyQuotes")
$useFancyQuotes [1] FALSE
> ?mean
This is at a DOS prompt. In the popup box I get
If ?trim? is zero (the default), the arithmetic mean of the
values in ?x? is computed, as a numeric or complex vector of
I think I saw this once, but have been unable to reproduce it since then. I may have had useFancyQuotes=TRUE on that one occasion. Since I can no longer reproduce this, and looking at the code shows no reason it shouldn't be deterministic, I'm going to have to give up on it. All I can suggest is that you should re-install R, preferably from the 2.10.0 patched version. It has a few bug fixes since the release, and whatever was causing the problem for you may have gone away. Duncan Murdoch
Also, from ?sQuote:
Where fancy quotes are used, you should be aware that they may not
be rendered correctly as not all fonts include the requisite
glyphs: for example some have directional single quotes but not
directional double quotes. This is particularly troublesome in
Windows ?Command Prompt? windows, which by default are set up
to run in the so-called OEM codepage, which in most locales uses a
different encoding from Windows. Further, if the codepage is
changed (with ?chcp.exe?, e.g. to 1252 in a Western European
language), the default raster fonts do not support the directional
quotes.
To work around this, the default for
?options("useFancyQuotes")? is ?FALSE? on Windows except
for the ?Rgui? console. There fancy quotes work with the
default Courier New font and more elegantly with Lucida Console
and standard the CJK fonts, but directional double quotes are
missing in raster fonts such as Courier and FixedSys.
Best,
Jim
When I run options("useFancyQuotes") in a new session, I see
> options("useFancyQuotes")
$useFancyQuotes [1] TRUE and when I ask for help, I see help pages that respect that choice, e.g.
> ?mean
gives ?trim = 0? in the description of x. If I set
> options(useFancyQuotes=FALSE) > ?mean
I see 'trim = 0'. Maybe if there's no typo, it's emacs or ESS that's messing up somehow. Duncan Murdoch