A bug in the Mac GUI and a request

Ivan,

First the bug:
R GUI version 1.17-pre (3821), Mac OS X system 10.4.7 on intel core  
duo.  Whenever (or almost)  I save the content of the quartz device  
(the graphics window) to a file, the window "Save Content of Quartz  
Device to PDF File" remains (or rather comes back) after pressing  
on the save button.  Furthermore this window cannot be closed,  
except by quiting the R GUI.

Ok, we'll have a look. There are issues with Cocoa since 10.4 that  
are still plaguing us ...

Now the request:
UTF-8 encoding support.  Since I have started working with csv  
files encoded in UTF-8 (which appears to be the native.enc in OS X)  
I have had quite a headache subsetting dataframes by values of a  
given factor (with text encoded in UTF-8 I pressume).  For instance  
"Compa?ia" appears as "Compa\361ia".

The problem here is that your are *not* using UTF-8. UTF-8 encoding  
of "?" is (if printed as octal codes) "\303\261". So what you see is  
something that is in a different encoding - AFAIC it is latin1 as you  
can see easily:

In command-line R (without locale):
 > iconv("Compa\361ia","latin1","UTF-8")
[1] "Compa\303\261ia"

In the GUI:
 > iconv("Compa\361ia","latin1","UTF-8")
[1] "Compa?ia"

So when you are loading your table, you should be using something like
read.table(file("my.table",encoding="latin1"))
to get the correct result.

You may want to read Brian Ripley's article about encodings and  
localization in the R News Vol 5/1.

Cheers,
Simon