This was reported to me by a colleague in China, so I may not be
reproducing exactly what they are seeing (which I suspect is rw2011), but
this is what I see:
> version
  _
platform i386--netbsdelf
arch   i386
os     netbsdelf
system  i386, netbsdelf
status
major   2
minor   1.1
year   2005
month   06
day    20
language R
> help(Hershey)
 :
 :
  If the 'vfont' argument to one of the text-drawing functions
  ('text', 'mtext', 'title', 'axis', and 'contour') is a character
  vector of length 2, Hershey vector fonts are used to render the
  text.
 :
      The other useful escape sequences all begin with '\\'. These
      are described below. Remember that backslashes have to be
      doubled in R character strings, so they need to be entered
      with _four_ backslashes.
 :
 :
> plot(runif(100))  # to get something on the screen
> text(0, 1, '\\Re', vfont=c('serif', 'plain'))  # works
> title(main = '\\Re', vfont=c('serif','plain'))  # doesn't work, and...
Warning message:
parameter "vfont" could not be set in high-level plot() function
> mtext('\\Re', 2, vfont=c('serif','plain'))  # doesn't work, but...
Warning message:
Hershey fonts not yet implemented for mtext() in: mtext(text, side, line, outer, at, adj, padj, cex, col, font,
> axis(3, at=50, tick=F, labels='\\Re', vfont=c('serif','plain'))  # doesn't work

Now at least mtext() 'redeems' itself with its Warning, but title()
contradicts the help(Hershey), and axis() just gets it wrong by printing
the characters "\Re" (or "\\Re" when the string is specified as
'\\\\Re' as alluded to in the Hershey documentation - but somewhat
contradicted by the success of the text() call above).

Now perhaps the problem is just with the Hershey documentation (or my
reading of it), but I don't know what is supposed to work. Or is there
some combination that I haven't tried?

Ray Brownrigg

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