Avoid non-breaking-space characters printing as tildes when using texi2dvi in R

Question

I'm using the Sweave toolchain in R to generate tex files from Sweave files as part of an R package. I use the R command:

    $(RSCRIPT) -e "tools::texi2dvi( 'file.tex', pdf = TRUE, clean = FALSE )" 

(part of my a Makefile in inst/doc) to generate the pdf. Non-breaking-space character ~ seems to be appearing as a real tilde in the resulting pdf. How do I avoid this? (I running pdflatex on the .tex file seems to do the trick, but I gather that is more platform dependent than using the R tools to compile the package. (More on R/Sweave makefiles in this question)

Answer 1

I have run into the same issue. At work right now I have a windows machine and the call to tools::texi2dvi seems work just fine, no unbreakable space in the resulting pdf. However, on my Ubuntu 11.10 machine at home I see the ~ character just as you described if I compile via tools::texi2dvi. My solution has been to use a system call from R to get the pdflatex if on Linux and tools::texi2dvi if on windows. I have the function as part of a build.R file for whatever project I'm working on that day.

compile <- function(){
  if (.Platform$OS != 'windows'){
    system("pdflatex ./tex/MAIN.tex")
  } else {
    tools::texi2dvi(file  = "./tex/MAIN.tex",
                    pdf   = TRUE,
                    clean = FALSE,
                    quiet = FALSE)
  }
}

compile()