A student entered some data with text characters like epsilon and alpha. On her Windows system, the Greek letters did not display properly in a plot. There were some ordinary ASCII instead.
I asked her to send me the code so I could test. For me, the plot looks ok on the screen. Format1 <- c(320,500,700,1000,500,320,700,500,320) Format2 <- c(800,1000,1150,1400,1500,1650,1800,2300,2500) Vowel <- c("u","o", "α", "a","ø", "y", "ε", "e","i") V1 <- data.frame(Format1,Format2,Vowel) plot(Format1 ~ Format2, data = V1, type="n") text(V1$Format2, V1$Format1, labels=V1$Vowel) On my Debian linux system, the plot shows the Greek letters just fine in the screen device. However, I turned on a pdf device to run the same code and see signs of trouble. > text(V1$Format2, V1$Format1, labels=V1$Vowel) Warning messages: 1: In text.default(V1$Format2, V1$Format1, labels = V1$Vowel) : conversion failure on 'α' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot substituted for <ce> 2: In text.default(V1$Format2, V1$Format1, labels = V1$Vowel) : conversion failure on 'α' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot substituted for <b1> 3: In text.default(V1$Format2, V1$Format1, labels = V1$Vowel) : font metrics unknown for Unicode character U+03b1 4: In text.default(V1$Format2, V1$Format1, labels = V1$Vowel) : conversion failure on 'α' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot substituted for <ce> 5: In text.default(V1$Format2, V1$Format1, labels = V1$Vowel) : conversion failure on 'α' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot substituted for <b1> 6: In text.default(V1$Format2, V1$Format1, labels = V1$Vowel) : conversion failure on 'ε' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot substituted for <ce> 7: In text.default(V1$Format2, V1$Format1, labels = V1$Vowel) : conversion failure on 'ε' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot substituted for <b5> 8: In text.default(V1$Format2, V1$Format1, labels = V1$Vowel) : font metrics unknown for Unicode character U+03b5 9: In text.default(V1$Format2, V1$Format1, labels = V1$Vowel) : conversion failure on 'ε' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot substituted for <ce> 10: In text.default(V1$Format2, V1$Format1, labels = V1$Vowel) : conversion failure on 'ε' in 'mbcsToSbcs': dot substituted for <b5> The alpha and epsilon characters don't appear in the pdf. I don't know the proper terminology to describe the situation, thus I don't know where to start reading. Until very recently, I didn't even know it was possible to directly enter these characters in Emacs, but I've learned that part. I understand you might answer "use plotmath", if if that's the only workable thing, I will teach her how. But that's a little bit of an up hill climb (from where we are now standing). It will be a lot more work for me to teach about expressions and whatnot, so if there is a direct route from a column of non ASCII characters to a plot that has those characters in it, I'd be glad to know. pj -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science Assoc. Director 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 Center for Research Methods University of Kansas University of Kansas http://pj.freefaculty.org http://quant.ku.edu ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.