[R] special symobol / character

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005, FISCHER, Matthew wrote:

>    Thanks for your speedy reply,  I should have noted
> that I'm using a Linux machine.  However, when I copy
> the symbol from Windows to Linux (using R/emacs) via an x-win 32 window
> it replaces the per mille symbol with a /211.

\211 I hope.  (That is octal for 137.)

> R then produces the character (not a per mille symbol!)
> that can be found in the equivalent place
> using character.table() in the Hmisc package.  I'd use
> windows, except we have huge output datasets generated
> by a climate model, and its not possible to move it to a machine
> running windows.
>
> Any other suggestions are welcome!,

Note that this is not as you claimed an ASCII symbol and it is not even an 
ISO Latin-1 symbol.  The area 128 to 143 is a control area in almost all 
encodings except WinAnsi, which is what you are using on Windows, I 
believe.

Try `man ascii' on your Linux system.

per mille is not AFAICS in the Adobe symbol font that plotmath uses, and 
so it cannot be added there.  In any case, it is text-like, not a symbol 
(you would want it in the same font as %).

It is the Unicode character U+2030, so you will be able to use it in a 
UTF-8 locale in R-2.1.0 via \u2030.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Eric Lecoutre [mailto:lecoutre at stat.ucl.ac.be]
> Sent: Tuesday, 15 February 2005 18:54
> To: FISCHER, Matthew; 'r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch'
> Subject: Re: [R] special symobol / character
>
>
>
> Hi Matthew,
>
> Most systems allow to enter any ASCII (or extended ASCII) character
> directly using a key combination.
> Accessing ANSI charcaters under Windows is possible with:
> ALT+0xxx (press ALT, hold it down, press 0 and the number of the character,
> release ALT)
> Thus: ALT+0137 makes: ?
> The future seems promising with the Unicode support: kudo R core team!
>
> Eric
>
>
> At 08:23 15/02/2005, FISCHER, Matthew wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>>     Is it possible to add a permil (or per mille) symbol to
>> an R plot (I couldn't find this symbol under demo(Hershey) or
>> the plotmath information).
>>
>> In some ascii tables it is symbol no. 137.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595