[R] Japanese in R --> work with *.Rd files !?

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "Shigeru" == Shigeru Mase <mase at is.titech.ac.jp> writes:

    Shigeru> Dear Paul,

    paul>  I think it should be possible for you to press a Japanese key on
    paul> your keyboard and have the appropriate Japanese character drawn
    paul> by the Hershey font.  However, at least one necessary condition
    paul> will be that your keypresses are encoded by the computer using
    paul> the same encoding that the Hershey fonts use, which is JIS X0208
    paul> standard.  Do you know how your keypresses are encoded ?
    paul> 
    paul> Just out of interest, I presume that the Japanese keys represent
    paul> Kana rather than Kanji.  Is that right and if so, how do you
    paul> normally type Kanji characters on a computer ?
    paul> 
    paul> paul

    Shigeru> Thank you for your kind information on the Hershey fonts
    Shigeru> facility of R.  It may be boring for a majority of R users to
    Shigeru> know details on the Japanese character system, but let me
    Shigeru> explain a little. In order to be widely used in non-English
    Shigeru> countries and among non-statisticians, R cannot avoid such
    Shigeru> subtle problems.


	     ... omitted ...
		 (but interesting for me, even as only a European
		  interested in languages)

    Shigeru> PS. Paul, I have just translate "Hershey.html" into Japanese
    Shigeru> and noted that there are several "<CODE></CODE>" in it. I
    Shigeru> guess this should be "<CODE>/</CODE>", true?

Please consider:  

 The HTML files are *NOT* the original documentation!
 In particular, they don't have the full mathematical formulae where
 available.

 The source of all the help files are the *.Rd files
 from which  html /  text / latex and R example files are
 created at "installation time" -- from the source version of R.

 { If you have only worked with binary distributions of R :
   These `Rd' ("R documentation") files are in src/library/<pkg>/man/*.Rd
   where <pkg> stands for  base , ctest, eda, ...., ts.
 }

So it really would make sense to translate these *.Rd files
and further "(inter)nationalize" the (Perl) file "etc/Rdconvlib.pl"
which is used [from src/scripts/Rdconv ] to produce the 4 different output
formats from the Rd input.
You'd have to translate things like  
      "Arguments:",  "Description:",  "Examples:", ....

--
Should we (R core) consider internationalizing these Rdtools ?
Are there helping volunteers from R users 
    (e.g. for French, Japanese, Spanish, ...? 
    [R core can provide Danish, Italian & German at least]

Martin
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