R SIG Debian - Oct 2009 - [OT] LaTeX peculiarities in Ubuntu 9.10 beta

I am running the beta test version of Ubuntu 9.10, x86_64 on a machine
and encountered some peculiarities in LaTeX called through

R-devel CMD texi2pdf file.tex

The tilde character in the input, which should produce a non-breaking
space, is now being rendered as a tilde.  Does anyone know where I
could begin exploring for explanations and/or workarounds?

On 19 October 2009 at 13:41, Douglas Bates wrote:
| I am running the beta test version of Ubuntu 9.10, x86_64 on a machine
| and encountered some peculiarities in LaTeX called through
| 
| R-devel CMD texi2pdf file.tex
| 
| The tilde character in the input, which should produce a non-breaking
| space, is now being rendered as a tilde.  Does anyone know where I
| could begin exploring for explanations and/or workarounds?

With Kurt and myself.  :-)

We had a years-long buglet where R builds "broke" latexing for
alpha/beta/rc
releases such as the one I made this morning. Here, I use a scheme such as
R-2.9.10~20091019 in both the package version and the build directory as dpkg
sorts this lower than plain old R-2.9.10 and the final releases will cleanly
replace the alpha/beta/rc variants.  However, this then broke the texinfo-to-pdf
conversion as texinfo et al choked over the ~ in the directory name.  So all
alpha/beta/rc build has essentially no pdf manuals.

I think the last thing I heard from Kurt on this a few months back was that
the 'feature' you observed had appeared. I am a little fuzzy on the
details
but maybe Kurt can fill in.

But FWIW latex'ing this

  \documentclass[12pt]{article}

  \begin{document}

  Here are two~words separated by a tilde.

  \end{document}

does not show a tilde in the pdf that resulted on Debian testing, with the
packages below.  Maybe an Ubuntu bug report is needed?  My two machines with
9.10 beta are currently unreachable for me.

Dirk

edd at ron:~> COLUMNS=74 dpkg -l | grep texlive
ii  texlive-base   2007.dfsg.2-4  TeX Live: Essential programs and files
ii  texlive-base-b 2007.dfsg.2-7  TeX Live: Essential binaries
ii  texlive-common 2007.dfsg.2-4  TeX Live: Base component
ii  texlive-doc-ba 2007.dfsg.2-2  TeX Live: Base documentation
ii  texlive-extra- 2007.dfsg.2-7  TeX Live: TeX auxiliary programs
ii  texlive-fonts- 2007.dfsg.2-4  TeX Live: Recommended fonts
ii  texlive-generi 2007.dfsg.17-2 TeX Live: Miscellaneous extra generic macros
ii  texlive-generi 2007.dfsg.2-4  TeX Live: Miscellaneous generic macros
ii  texlive-latex- 2007.dfsg.2-4  TeX Live: Basic LaTeX packages
ii  texlive-latex- 2007.dfsg.17-2 TeX Live: LaTeX supplementary packages
ii  texlive-latex- 2007.dfsg.2-4  TeX Live: LaTeX recommended packages
ii  texlive-pictur 2007.dfsg.2-4  TeX Live: Packages for drawings graphics
ii  texlive-scienc 2007.dfsg.17-2 TeX Live: Typesetting for natural and comput
edd at ron:~> 

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.

Doug,

I am not quite sure is this answers your question, but...

If you look at the 'build-r-base.sh' script that Vincent Goulet wrote to
build the Ubunutu packages 
(https://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/svn/R/cran-ubuntu/build-r-base.sh), the 
following was added:

# Change any ~ in the name of the build directory for a - to avoid a
# bug in texi2dvi.
if [ -d r-base-*~* ]
then
     dir=`ls -d r-base-*~*`
     mv $dir `echo $dir | sed y/~/-/`
fi

Our other option was to ask a large man in a nice suit to see if he 
could convince Dirk that putting tildes in the titles of his R beta 
packages was a bad idea.

This has been reported, and it claims to have been fixed.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=495577

Michael

Douglas Bates wrote:
> I am running the beta test version of Ubuntu 9.10, x86_64 on a machine
> and encountered some peculiarities in LaTeX called through
> 
> R-devel CMD texi2pdf file.tex
> 
> The tilde character in the input, which should produce a non-breaking
> space, is now being rendered as a tilde.  Does anyone know where I
> could begin exploring for explanations and/or workarounds?
> 
> _______________________________________________
> R-SIG-Debian mailing list
> R-SIG-Debian at r-project.org
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-debian
-- 
Dr. Michael A. Rutter
School of Science
Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
Station Road
Erie, PA 16563
http://math.bd.psu.edu/faculty/rutter

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik at wu.ac.at>
wrote:
>>>>>> Dirk Eddelbuettel writes:
>
>> On 19 October 2009 at 13:41, Douglas Bates wrote:
>> | I am running the beta test version of Ubuntu 9.10, x86_64 on a
machine
>> | and encountered some peculiarities in LaTeX called through
>> |
>> | R-devel CMD texi2pdf file.tex
>> |
>> | The tilde character in the input, which should produce a non-breaking
>> | space, is now being rendered as a tilde. ?Does anyone know where I
>> | could begin exploring for explanations and/or workarounds?
>
>> With Kurt and myself. ?:-)
>
> Actually, I recently talked to Karl Berry about this, and he will modify
> upstream so that the tilde magic only gets performed for texinfo
> sources. ?(He did not apply the patch to upstream yet, though.)
So the temporary workaround is not to use texi2pdf but instead use pdflatex?
>
> Best
> -k
>
>> We had a years-long buglet where R builds "broke" latexing
for alpha/beta/rc
>> releases such as the one I made this morning. Here, I use a scheme such
as
>> R-2.9.10~20091019 in both the package version and the build directory
as dpkg
>> sorts this lower than plain old R-2.9.10 and the final releases will
cleanly
>> replace the alpha/beta/rc variants. ?However, this then broke the
texinfo-to-pdf
>> conversion as texinfo et al choked over the ~ in the directory name.
?So all
>> alpha/beta/rc build has essentially no pdf manuals.
>
>> I think the last thing I heard from Kurt on this a few months back was
that
>> the 'feature' you observed had appeared. I am a little fuzzy on
the details
>> but maybe Kurt can fill in.
>
>> But FWIW latex'ing this
>
>> ? \documentclass[12pt]{article}
>
>> ? \begin{document}
>
>> ? Here are two~words separated by a tilde.
>
>> ? \end{document}
>
>> does not show a tilde in the pdf that resulted on Debian testing, with
the
>> packages below. ?Maybe an Ubuntu bug report is needed? ?My two machines
with
>> 9.10 beta are currently unreachable for me.
>
>> Dirk
>
>> edd at ron:~> COLUMNS=74 dpkg -l | grep texlive
>> ii ?texlive-base ? 2007.dfsg.2-4 ?TeX Live: Essential programs and
files
>> ii ?texlive-base-b 2007.dfsg.2-7 ?TeX Live: Essential binaries
>> ii ?texlive-common 2007.dfsg.2-4 ?TeX Live: Base component
>> ii ?texlive-doc-ba 2007.dfsg.2-2 ?TeX Live: Base documentation
>> ii ?texlive-extra- 2007.dfsg.2-7 ?TeX Live: TeX auxiliary programs
>> ii ?texlive-fonts- 2007.dfsg.2-4 ?TeX Live: Recommended fonts
>> ii ?texlive-generi 2007.dfsg.17-2 TeX Live: Miscellaneous extra generic
macros
>> ii ?texlive-generi 2007.dfsg.2-4 ?TeX Live: Miscellaneous generic
macros
>> ii ?texlive-latex- 2007.dfsg.2-4 ?TeX Live: Basic LaTeX packages
>> ii ?texlive-latex- 2007.dfsg.17-2 TeX Live: LaTeX supplementary
packages
>> ii ?texlive-latex- 2007.dfsg.2-4 ?TeX Live: LaTeX recommended packages
>> ii ?texlive-pictur 2007.dfsg.2-4 ?TeX Live: Packages for drawings
graphics
>> ii ?texlive-scienc 2007.dfsg.17-2 TeX Live: Typesetting for natural and
comput
>> edd at ron:~>
>
>> --
>> Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.
>
>

On 19 October 2009 at 14:45, Douglas Bates wrote:
| On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik at wu.ac.at>
wrote:
| >>>>>> Dirk Eddelbuettel writes:
| >
| >> On 19 October 2009 at 13:41, Douglas Bates wrote:
| >> | I am running the beta test version of Ubuntu 9.10, x86_64 on a
machine
| >> | and encountered some peculiarities in LaTeX called through
| >> |
| >> | R-devel CMD texi2pdf file.tex
| >> |
| >> | The tilde character in the input, which should produce a
non-breaking
| >> | space, is now being rendered as a tilde. ?Does anyone know where I
| >> | could begin exploring for explanations and/or workarounds?
| >
| >> With Kurt and myself. ?:-)
| >
| > Actually, I recently talked to Karl Berry about this, and he will modify
| > upstream so that the tilde magic only gets performed for texinfo
| > sources. ?(He did not apply the patch to upstream yet, though.)
| 
| So the temporary workaround is not to use texi2pdf but instead use pdflatex?

Ah yes, indeed -- that never become part of my workflow. If I use texi2pdf, I
also see the bug on Debian testing.  If you switch to pdflatex you may well be
good on Ubuntu 9.10 as pdflatex is what works for me on Debian.

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.