Hi all, By default, MetaPost passes all text through TeX. This has the advantage of allowing essentially any TeX symbols in titles and labels. It give us, who use the multibyte character in ordinary communication, much convenience. Gnuplot has fulfilled this function, and it give me a deep impression for I could use Chinese character in plots with a minor modification to the MetaPost file. I hope the R Development Core Team could consider MetaPost as a graphic device in future R version. Best wishes, Jinsong Zhao _________________________________________________________
On Sun, 7 Mar 2004, [gb2312] Jinsong Zhao wrote:> By default, MetaPost passes all text through TeX. This has the > advantage of allowing essentially any TeX symbols in titles and labels. > It give us, who use the multibyte character in ordinary communication, > much convenience. Gnuplot has fulfilled this function, and it give me a > deep impression for I could use Chinese character in plots with a minor > modification to the MetaPost file.I don't think so: you would still need character metrics for the fonts you use to be able to centre them, for example.> I hope the R Development Core Team could consider MetaPost as a graphic > device in future R version.We would welcome your contributing such a device. Note though that there is a public API for graphics devices, and so you could just contribute the device to CRAN. If perchance you meant `I want the R core team to write a metapost device for me', then you have not grasped how Open Source projects work. There are some plans for internationalization of R via UTF-8, but this will be a considerable amount (man months?) of work, and of very little benefit to any of the core developers. Volunteers would be welcome. -- 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
Users may have insights that the developers may not have and those ideas may usefully find their way into R, even if the promoter of the idea does not have the capabilities or resources to implement it. Surely, good ideas such as this one should be mentioned. Maybe that user will implement it or maybe someone from the R core will or maybe some other user will. Who knows? No one will if no one knows about it. Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2004 14:42:17 +0000 (GMT) From: Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> To: =?gb2312?q?Jinsong=20Zhao?= <zh_jinsong at yahoo.com.cn> Cc: rhelp <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch> Subject: Re: [R] graphic device MetaPost On Sun, 7 Mar 2004, [gb2312] Jinsong Zhao wrote:> By default, MetaPost passes all text through TeX. This has the > advantage of allowing essentially any TeX symbols in titles and labels. > It give us, who use the multibyte character in ordinary communication, > much convenience. Gnuplot has fulfilled this function, and it give me a > deep impression for I could use Chinese character in plots with a minor > modification to the MetaPost file.I don't think so: you would still need character metrics for the fonts you use to be able to centre them, for example.> I hope the R Development Core Team could consider MetaPost as a graphic > device in future R version.We would welcome your contributing such a device. Note though that there is a public API for graphics devices, and so you could just contribute the device to CRAN. If perchance you meant `I want the R core team to write a metapost device for me', then you have not grasped how Open Source projects work. There are some plans for internationalization of R via UTF-8, but this will be a considerable amount (man months?) of work, and of very little benefit to any of the core developers. Volunteers would be welcome. -- 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
On 7 Mar 2004, Jinsong Zhao said:> use Chinese character in plots with a minor modification to the MetaPost > file.I never tried this, but maybe it is possible to use the psfrag LaTeX package to insert Chinese characters into an eps file (with the help of proper ps fonts and the CJK packages of course)? Michael