R devel - Oct 2008 - Thin spaces

Hi all,

I'm looking at providing some nicer number formatting features for
axes in ggplot2.  One thing I would like to do is use thin spaces to
separate digits, like you can in latex.  I realise I can use unicode
spaces to do this (e.g.
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/spaces.html), but what are the
possible pitfalls.  Is this likely to work on all graphics devices
across all platforms?

Thanks,

Hadley

-- 
http://had.co.nz/

On Sat, 11 Oct 2008, hadley wickham wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm looking at providing some nicer number formatting features for
> axes in ggplot2.  One thing I would like to do is use thin spaces to
> separate digits, like you can in latex.  I realise I can use unicode
> spaces to do this (e.g.
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/spaces.html), but what are the
> possible pitfalls.  Is this likely to work on all graphics devices
> across all platforms?
Unlikely to work on most devices.

They are not supported in postscript() or pdf(): neither of their 
underlying languages support Unicode, so they are restricted to basically 
one human language.

windows(), quartz() and X11() support Unicode, but in the case of X11 the 
fonts are often pretty incomplete so you need to check on the target 
machine.  A quick check on windows() suggests \u2009 is not in the 
commonly used MS fonts (as your reference says).

All it needed was a very simple experiment to answer your question.  Hint: 
try

plot(1:10); text(4, 6, "1\u{2009}2")

-- 
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)
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