[Rd] unicode in R documentation

[Frederick Eaton]

Dear R Team,

I am running R from the terminal command line (not RStudio). I've noticed that R has been using Unicode quotes in its documentation for some time, maybe since before I started using it.

I am wondering if it is possible to compile the documentation to use normal quotes instead.

I find it useful to be able to search documentation for strings with quotes, for example when reading "?options" I might search for "'dev" to find an option starting with the letters "dev". Without the single-quote at the front, there would be a lot of matches that I'm not interested in, but the single-quote at the front helps narrow it down to the parameters that are being indexed in the documentation. However, I can't actually search for "'dev" in "?options" because it is written with curly quotes "‘device’" and "'" does not match "‘" on my machine.

Similarly, when I read manual pages for commands on Linux, I sometimes search for "-r" instead of "r" because "-r" is likely to find documentation for the option "-r", while searching for "r" will match almost every line.

I'm wondering what other people do when reading through documentation. Do you search for things at all or just read it straight through? Is there a hyperlinked version that just lets you jump to the "device" entry in "?options" or do you have to type out a search string? What search string do you use? Do you have a way to enter Unicode quotes when doing this, or does your pager provide a special regular expression syntax which makes it easier to match them?

Thanks,

Frederick