[R] Decimal point as a comma in postcript and pdf graphics

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Ronny Klein wrote:

> Hi,
>
> after a lengthy but unsuccessfull search I couldn't come up with a 
> solution to the following problem:
>
> I would like to have a "comma" instead of a "point" as the decimal point in my
> graphics, i.e. postscript and pdf files, for I write my thesis in German. My
> system is:
>
> OS: Debian Unstable
> R-Version:  2.0.1
> System locale: de_DE at euro
>
> Could someone, please, help me out or at least point me to the right
> documentation. I'm just lost at the moment.

You need to label your axes with comma: R does not support , as a decimal 
point.  Use explicit calls to axis(), or edit the postscript after 
production.

No one has ever requested this before.  Since the grammar would not allow 
, to be used as a decimal point for console input, it is awkward to allow 
it for output (but a few functions such as write.table do).


> PS: The problem of displaying the German umlauts, I have already solved: I
> have to use the WinAnsi.enc as the default encoding file. Which is odd in my
> opinion.

It's not true!  There is a problem with some PDF viewers, worked around a 
long time ago in R-patched:

     o	Some PDF readers do not define PDFDocEncoding, so pdf()'s
 	ISOLatin1 encoding is now derived from WinAnsi rather than
 	PDFDocEncoding.

It seems Adobe changed the standard since the version that the pdf() 
device was written to support, and some viewers are not backwards 
compatible.

-- 
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