[R] How to draw a per mille symbol?

[Gavin Simpson]

On Tue, 2006-09-19 at 17:53 +0100, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Sep 2006, Gavin Simpson wrote:
> 
> > Dear list,
> >
> > Following advice posted to this list a while back by Prof Ripley [1], I
> > have been trying to draw a per mille character [2] in an axis label.
> >
> > This should give the correct character:
> >
> > plot(1:10, ylab = "\u2030")
> >
> > but all I get is '"S'. I'm running linux (FC5) and have fonts installed
> > that have the correct character (viewed in the Gnome character map at
> > least).
> 
> On what device?  If X11, this is almost always a font selection issue.
> Unicode support in X11 fonts is a complex issue that seems to vary with 
> every minor update.

Yes, this was an X11 device.

> 
> > I have also tried plotting to a pdf device with a font family that the
> > character map tool shows I have a per mille glyph for, e.g.:
> 
> What does character map have to do with postscript fonts?

Given your comment, nothing. You've probably guessed I know very little
about fonts, and had naively assumed that a font of the same name as a
name displayed by postscriptFonts() or pdfFonts(), which showed a per
mille sign in the character map tool in Gnome, were one and the same
thing.

> 
> > pdf("~/tmp/test_per_mille.pdf", paper = "a4", family = "URWBookman")
> > plot(1:10, ylab = "\u2030")
> > dev.off()
> >
> > But all I get here is a period or a dot-like symbol.
> 
> But see the article in R-news 2006-2 about this.  All we can do for PDF is 
> to use an appropriate 8-bit font map, or a CJK font.  It seems that e.g.
> encoding="CP1251" works, even for Helvetica.
> 

Ok, thanks for this - I've now read this and think I understand the
issues and how to work with fonts in R a bit better now.

The ultimate aim was to be able to include relevant code in a Sweave
document. I'm not aware of a way to pass extra instructions to the pdf
generator code in Sweave, so the solution will involve generating the
pdf within embedded R code directly and inserting the figure manually
into the the document. Is my thinking correct here?

Thanks again for answering my questions, Prof. Ripley.

G

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