R help - Mar 2005 - Users in Ukraine & cyrillic support

Hello, everybody:

My friends in Ukraine are starting a research lab at a national
university and they asked what programs to use.  I said "R" of course,
and they then asked me 'what support does it have for Cyrillic'?

i've done some snooping in the R website and all the references i find
to foreign languages concern c and fortran, not Ukrainian or Russian.
Since i'm an English-only user, I have no idea what is involved here, or
what difficulties might be caused with non-English character sets and
file systems.

Not to mention the problem that the documentation/manuals are in English.

If you have any advice that I can collect up for my friends, I would
appreciate it.

-- 
Paul E. Johnson                       email: pauljohn at ku.edu
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn
1541 Lilac Lane, Rm 504
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66044-3177           FAX: (785) 864-5700

As from the next release it has support of almost all human languages.
Previews of that are available now.


On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Paul Johnson wrote:
> Hello, everybody:
>
> My friends in Ukraine are starting a research lab at a national
> university and they asked what programs to use.  I said "R" of
course,
> and they then asked me 'what support does it have for Cyrillic'?
>
> i've done some snooping in the R website and all the references i find
> to foreign languages concern c and fortran, not Ukrainian or Russian.
> Since i'm an English-only user, I have no idea what is involved here,
or
> what difficulties might be caused with non-English character sets and
> file systems.
>
> Not to mention the problem that the documentation/manuals are in English.
>
> If you have any advice that I can collect up for my friends, I would
> appreciate it.
>
> -- 
> Paul E. Johnson                       email: pauljohn at ku.edu
> Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn
> 1541 Lilac Lane, Rm 504
> University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
> Lawrence, Kansas 66044-3177           FAX: (785) 864-5700
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide!
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>
-- 
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 Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Paul Johnson wrote:
> Hello, everybody:
>
> My friends in Ukraine are starting a research lab at a national
> university and they asked what programs to use.  I said "R" of
course,
> and they then asked me 'what support does it have for Cyrillic'?

The development version (to become 2.1.0) supports a wide variety of 
character encodings and has facilities for translation of error/warning 
messages (though someone still has to do the translation).

See
   http://developer.r-project.org/descriptions.Encodings_and_R.html
and
   http://developer.r-project.org/Translations.html
for some descriptions

>
> Not to mention the problem that the documentation/manuals are in English.
>
This, of course, is a much bigger job and a more rapidly moving target.


 	-thomas

Paul Johnson <pauljohn at ku.edu> writes:
> Hello, everybody:
> 
> My friends in Ukraine are starting a research lab at a national
> university and they asked what programs to use.  I said "R" of
course,
> and they then asked me 'what support does it have for Cyrillic'?
> 
> i've done some snooping in the R website and all the references i find
> to foreign languages concern c and fortran, not Ukrainian or Russian.
> Since i'm an English-only user, I have no idea what is involved here,
or
> what difficulties might be caused with non-English character sets and
> file systems.
> 
> Not to mention the problem that the documentation/manuals are in English.
> 
> If you have any advice that I can collect up for my friends, I would
> appreciate it.

Well, you're probably not going to find someone to translate the
manual into Ukrainian outside Ukraine...

The good news is that, due to our indefatigueable mr. Ripley, R-2.1.0
will have support for UTF-8, including Cyrillic. It will also have
some support for message catalogs and the potential to change the GUI
language. Check out the NEWS file in R-devel
(https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/NEWS).


-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907