[R] umlauts in Rd files

[Spencer Graves]

Hi, Robin:

	  Have you considered using "moebius"?  In my elementary German class, 
I was taught that "oe" was an acceptable alternative to the umlaut. 
(This may not be relevant, but Google just gave me 788,000 hits for 
"moebius" and 750,000 for "mobius".)  Perhaps one of our German 
contributors could tell us which they prefer.

	  I use a keyboard that is mostly standard US.  I still sometimes write 
things in Spanish, French, or German.  In addition to my limited 
facility with other languages, I'm also crippled when it comes to 
creating special characters like umlauts, to say nothing of Japanese or 
Chinese characters.  If you want "möbius" for a package that you expect 
others to use, do you want to restrict its usage only to people who know 
how to create your special characters?  One of our Japanese contributors 
could write a function to compute Akaike's information criterion or 
something else named after a prominent Asian and require the rest of us 
to configure our computers to created the Japanese or Chinese or Korean 
characters to "properly" represent the name.  For the names of files and 
functions, it would be much simpler though less elegant if we restricted 
ourselves to the most universal character set;  of course the content of 
those files, etc., may reflect the different culture and heritage of the 
user.

	  Best Wishes,
	  spencer graves	

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

> On Wed, 15 Jun 2005, Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> 
>> Robin Hankin <r.hankin at noc.soton.ac.uk> writes:
>>
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> I'm having difficulty following the advice in section 2.7 of R-exts.
>>>
>>> In one of my packages, there is a function called mobius().
>>>
>>> I want to refer to it in the Rd file as the Möbius function, and to
>>> illustrate the
>>>   Möbius  inversion formula (just to be explicit: this is "Mobius" but
>>> with two dots over the second letter).
>>>
>>> R-exts section 2.7  gives
>>>
>>> \enc{Jöreskog}{Joreskog}
>>>
>>> as an example, but when I cut-and-paste this, the dvi file (as produced
>>> by R CMD Rd2dvi)
>>> shows the umlauted "o" as A and Z with some diacritical marks, not the
>>> desired o with
>>> two dots on.
>>>
>>> Using \"{o} is fine for the dvi output but not the ascii output.
>>>
>>> How do I put an umlauted "o" in an Rd file in such a way as to have a
>>> nice
>>> ascii help page and nice dvi files?
>>
>>
>> Well... You can't. There's no odiaeresis in ASCII. That's exactly the
>> problem. In UTF-8 or ISO-Latin-1/9 (aka 8859-1 or ditto with the
>> addition of the Euro) you can display the character and we did
>> previously implicitly assume Latin-1. However this is of no use to
>> people in say Latin-2 locales, and in fact we can no longer spell the
>> entire R Core Team correctly using any of the Latin-N locales (we
>> lose either M{\"a}chler or {\v S}imon).
>>
>> As far as I understand the current situation, we recommend that text
>> files be pure ASCII (which has also led us to introduce deliberate
>> misspellings of various people in the NEWS file and similar places).
>>
>> What is happening to you is something else though: The double
>> characters are a tell-tale sign that you have provided UTF-8 to
>> something that expected an 8-bit encoding like Latin-1. The fix for
>> that should be to put \encoding{UTF-8} somewhere at the beginning of
>> the .Rd file.
>>
>> (I may well have gotten some detail wrong here, Brian probably knows
>> the best.)
> 
> 
> UTF-8 for latex does not work well (as yet, at least: there is now a 
> utf8 encoding that allows at least the first plane (Latin-1) to work).  
> So it would be much better to use Latin-1 for the file and mark it with 
> \encoding{latin1} and mark specifically with \enc{Möbius}{Mobius} or 
> your preferred transliteration.
> 
> The problem is not really for Latin-2 (which does have a and o 
> diaeresis), but languages such as Japanese and Chinese which only have 
> ASCII.  So the transliteration is for people without any accents in 
> their charset.
> 
> 
> 
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