font encoding issue

I will admit I have not tried yet to manipulate the "locale" information like 
another user suggested on this list. After reading your message I thought I 
did not need to.

You do need to.  R uses 8-bit characters internally, and relies on the 
system to tell it which bytes correspond to printable characters. This is 
locale-dependent, and so it isn't possible to get it right without the 
right locale. There are other reasons to use the right locale, but they 
don't apply as strongly to French (eg, a number of languages from around 
the Baltic have importantly different collating orders from English)
There are plans to convert the internals of R to Unicode (probably UCS-2 
rather than UTF-8) but it isn't there yet.



 	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley@u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle