R help - Feb 2025 - Code \255 no longer working to produce a short dash in base R PDF graphs

I make graphs, in large quantities, for perfectionists.

My bosses do not like the results of text like 'baseline-defined' in
graphs; they feel that the resulting dash is too long.

For many years, I have been in the habit of producing graphs with shorter dashes
as follows:

pdf("myfile.pdf")
plot(1, 10)
text(1, 11, "baseline\255defined")
text(1, 9, "done")
graphics.off()

They like that dash - but I never knew what it was called.

Recently work updated my PC to the latest version of Windows, and, perforce, I
updated to the latest version of R (4.4.2).
(So I'm not sure which change caused my problem; in any case I cannot
practically go back for either.)

The code above now fails, with the error message:
Error in text.default(1, 11, "baseline\xaddefined") : invalid input
'baseline> text(1, 9, "done")

I'm trying various Unicode values, currently settling on \U{2010}, but
I'm getting complaints about the length of my dashes.
I'm no expert on fonts, and perhaps I've missed a Unicode value that
would be perfect.

Is there a way to get back to what I had, without resorting to more complicated
code, please?

Thank you for looking at my deeply obscure niche problem!

                               Paul

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

? Wed, 19 Feb 2025 11:36:15 +0000
Paul Sherliker via R-help <r-help at r-project.org> ?????:
> text(1, 11, "baseline\255defined")
> text(1, 9, "done")
> graphics.off()
> 
> They like that dash - but I never knew what it was called.
> 
> Recently work updated my PC to the latest version of Windows, and,
> perforce, I updated to the latest version of R (4.4.2).
Nowadays, the session encoding on appropriately new versions of Windows
is UTF-8 [*]. Previously, the native encoding of the R session
corresponded to the ANSI encoding of your computer, most likely CP1252.
Let's see what does \255 mean in that encoding:

iconv('\255', 'CP1252', '') |> utf8ToInt() |>
as.hexmode()
# [1] "ad"

Does '\uad' work for you?

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan

[*]
https://blog.r-project.org/2020/05/02/utf-8-support-on-windows/index.html

On 2025-02-19 6:36 a.m., Paul Sherliker via R-help
wrote:
> I make graphs, in large quantities, for perfectionists.
> 
> My bosses do not like the results of text like 'baseline-defined'
in graphs; they feel that the resulting dash is too long.
> 
> For many years, I have been in the habit of producing graphs with shorter
dashes as follows:
> 
> pdf("myfile.pdf")
> plot(1, 10)
> text(1, 11, "baseline\255defined")
> text(1, 9, "done")
> graphics.off()
> 
> They like that dash - but I never knew what it was called.
> 
> Recently work updated my PC to the latest version of Windows, and,
perforce, I updated to the latest version of R (4.4.2).
> (So I'm not sure which change caused my problem; in any case I cannot
practically go back for either.)
> 
> The code above now fails, with the error message:
> Error in text.default(1, 11, "baseline\xaddefined") : invalid
input 'baseline> text(1, 9, "done")
> 
> I'm trying various Unicode values, currently settling on \U{2010}, but
I'm getting complaints about the length of my dashes.
> I'm no expert on fonts, and perhaps I've missed a Unicode value
that would be perfect.
This web page:  https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/category/Pd lists a 
lot of choices.  You didn't say what the complaints were ("too
long"?
"too short"?), so I can't recommend what to try other than
\U{2010}, but
there is a big variety of choices there.

Duncan Murdoch
> 
> Is there a way to get back to what I had, without resorting to more
complicated code, please?
> 
> Thank you for looking at my deeply obscure niche problem!
> 
>                                 Paul
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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