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[R-pkg-devel] Math symbols in .Rd files

3 messages · Bert Gunter, Rolf Turner

Original
Bert Gunter
# 
OS: Mac OSX Catalina
R Version 3.6.3
UTF-8 declared as Encoding in DESCRIPTION file

First, apologies: I'm nearly certain that this has been asked (many
times) before, and I think I know the answer. But I need to verify.

\eqn{...} allows me to insert a few math symbols in .Rd files, but
does not seem to work for symbols equivalent to unicode U+00B0 (degree
sign) and U+00B1 (plus minus sign). That is \eqn{\pm } is not rendered
properly, and there is no degree sign for Latex without adding
packages.  I can enter these as Mac symbols (presumably using UTF-8
encoding)  and they render properly on my machine in the installed
package documentation. But CRAN's winbuilder doesn't like them with
error message:

LaTeX errors found:
! Package inputenc Error: Unicode char ? (U+2264)
(inputenc)                not set up for use with LaTeX.

Are there any fixes/workarounds other than a fallback to plain text?

Thanks. Again, my apologies for asking this again, but I just wanted
to be sure my understanding is correct -- or find out where I'm
confused.

Bert Gunter
Rolf Turner
#
On 23/04/20 11:03 am, Bert Gunter wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
My understanding is that \eqn{...} doesn't really work with html, only 
with LaTeX.  You need to do something like:

\eqn{\hat{\theta} \pm 1.96 \times SE}{theta.hat +/- 1.96*SE}

which (for me at least) gives a nicely rendered result in LaTeX -> pdf 
and the kludgy workaround in html.

As for the degree sign I find that \eqn{42^\circ} gives acceptable 
results in LaTeX, but of course doesn't work in html.

My understanding is that if you enclose things like "?" or "?" in 
\enc{...} and have

\encoding{UTF-8}

as the very first line of your *.Rd file, then CRAN won't complain about 
the presence of these symbols.  But this doesn't work inside \eqn{...}; 
there the "\enc{...}" gets rendered literally.

So for html I think you are stuck with the kludgy fallback to plain text.

cheers,

Rolf

  
    

      
      
    

  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Bert Gunter
    

    

      
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Thanks, Rolf. This is very helpful.

Actually, I'm not that concerned about latex --> pdf. It's the html
that I want rendered nicely. So I'll see is that \enc{...} approach
works and gets me through the CRAN checks.

Not that the package is a big deal anyway -- just something I hope
might be useful to a few folks on occasion.

Bert

        
On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 7:17 PM Rolf Turner <r.turner at auckland.ac.nz> wrote: