R help - Mar 2010 - Plot ``freezes''.

In an elderly version of ``plotSymbols'' (now in the cwhmisc package)
that
I had lying around, there was the example

plot(1:10,xlab="\374")

which the comments said would give a u-umlaut as the x-axis label.

When I execute this plot

	(a) I get no x-axis label at all, and

	(b) the plot ``freezes'' in that further plotting commands
	(e.g. plot(runif(42))) produce no results.  The plot window (X11)
	remains as it was after the ``plot(1:10,xlab="\374")''
command.
	No error message is given, but no new plot is produced.

If I do dev.off(), then normal plotting recommences.  Can anyone explain
to me what is going on here?  My session info is given below.  I run R
from the command line, from a terminal window.

	cheers,

		Rolf Turner
> sessionInfo()
R version 2.10.1 (2009-12-14) 
i386-apple-darwin8.11.1 

locale:
[1] en_NZ.UTF-8/en_NZ.UTF-8/C/C/en_NZ.UTF-8/en_NZ.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] datasets  utils     stats     graphics  grDevices methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] misc_0.0-12    fortunes_1.3-7 MASS_7.3-4    




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On Wed, 24 Mar 2010, Rolf Turner wrote:
>
> In an elderly version of ``plotSymbols'' (now in the cwhmisc
package) that
> I had lying around, there was the example
>
> plot(1:10,xlab="\374")
>
> which the comments said would give a u-umlaut as the x-axis label.
In a Latin-1 encoding, which R gave up as default in 2.1.0.
You should just be able to use

plot(1:10,xlab="?")

or failing that (and the mailer may trash that line)

plot(1:10,xlab="\u00fc")
> When I execute this plot
>
> 	(a) I get no x-axis label at all, and
>
> 	(b) the plot ``freezes'' in that further plotting commands
> 	(e.g. plot(runif(42))) produce no results.  The plot window (X11)
> 	remains as it was after the ``plot(1:10,xlab="\374")''
command.
> 	No error message is given, but no new plot is produced.
>
> If I do dev.off(), then normal plotting recommences.  Can anyone explain
> to me what is going on here?  My session info is given below.  I run R
> from the command line, from a terminal window.
My guess is that this is your 'elderly' Mac OS X11 plotting system.
Does X11(type="Xlib") behave?  If so, this suggests that the Mac OS X 
implementation of cairo (supplied by Simon Urbanek) is not too robust 
(which in a several ways we already know).  On Linux I get warnings

(process:14674): Pango-WARNING **: Invalid UTF-8 string passed to 
pango_layout_set_text()

and a 'broken char' symbol on the plot.
> 	cheers,
>
> 		Rolf Turner
>
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.10.1 (2009-12-14)
> i386-apple-darwin8.11.1
>
> locale:
> [1] en_NZ.UTF-8/en_NZ.UTF-8/C/C/en_NZ.UTF-8/en_NZ.UTF-8
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] datasets  utils     stats     graphics  grDevices methods   base
>
> other attached packages:
> [1] misc_0.0-12    fortunes_1.3-7 MASS_7.3-4
-- 
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