font encoding issue
Last November I enquired about having accents in R console. One of the replies was
Martin Maechler maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch Wed Nov 24 10:31:14 CET 2004
<...>
No, it's not "R itself", since this works in quite a few other circumstances in other R consoles: You should be able to use accents even in strings and plot them, see
> example(text)
in R, and even in R object names : E.g. (in a Linux console):
> Z?ri <- "exemple ? suivre" # ? suivre > Z?ri
[1] "exemple ? suivre"
>
--------- However it is -- as you write -- an encoding issue, and probably also depending quite a bit on your so called "Locale" settings. To learn more, e.g., see in R
> apropos("locale")
[1] "Sys.getlocale" "Sys.localeconv" "Sys.setlocale" and now, e.g.,
> ?Sys.getlocale
Here (where I mainly work with Redhat Enterprise Linux) I've explicitly turned off the Unicode locale (UTF-8 to be specific) and reverted to "C" (or "POSIX"), by at least setting 'LANG=C' or 'LANG=POSIX' instead of something like 'LANG=en_US.UTF-8'. Look at what
> Sys.getenv("LANG")
tells you, and consider
> Sys.putenv(LANG = "C")
Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich
Since then I had set locale to C and also LANG to C which allowed me to have the symbol for a degree sign to appear correctly in axis labels. I don't know why but I cannot get this symbol in my plots anymore. I've checked and locale and LANG are still set to "C". But running example(text) as suggested above produces a plot with all kinds of mistakes. All the french accents, for instance, are wrong. I've looked at the CRAN archives and some of the posts suggested setting the encoding to ISOLatin1 when creating a pdf file. I've tried that too. I've even gone back to setting LANG to ISOLatin1, with no success either. Can someone put be back on track, please? Thanks in advance, Denis Chabot