The R Project SVN R

        Windows-specific changes to R
        =============================

See the file NEWS for changes that affect all versions of R.


rw1010
======

There is now a GUI preferences editor on the Edit menu in Rgui.

A data entry editor is now implemented.  This is similar to the Unix
one (see ?dataentry) with the additional feature that right-clicking
in a cell turns it into an editable field (entered as a new value
by navigating away from the cell).

Rterm will now load and save the commands history (as Rgui does).
There is a new item on the File menu in Rgui to save the commands
history at that point in a session, and a new function savehistory()
(only applicable in Rgui and Rterm).

Colours in Rconsole can be specified as "Windows" and will be taken 
from the current Windows colour scheme. (The preferences editor will
save the actual colour, though.)

The placement of multiple pagers is now `random' (so they will not
always appear in the centre of the screen) and under the MDI interface
the pager rows and columns settings are respected.

The postscript() device can now spool plots to a printer. You will
need a suitable program to send a file to the spooler (or even to send
it to ghostscript to interpret PostScript for the printer): the RedMon
suite available from http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/rjl.html should
provide suitable tools.  See ?postscript for further details.

The new xfig() device can be used, and a port of xfig to Windows (with
an X server and the Cygwin B20.1 environment and X11R6.4 installed) is at
ftp.franken.de:/pub/win32/develop/gnuwin32/cygwin/porters/Humblet_Pierre_A/B20
as  xfig-3.2.2-cygwin-b20.1-bin.tar.gz

The R DLL and executables now have standard Windows version
information, which will appear on a Version tab of the Properties
dialog box in Explorer.

The internal unzip and the installer now use unzip5.41, not unzip5.40, and
the DLL interface is incompatible.

There are changes in the tools needed to build R (see the file INSTALL)
and those recommended for building packages from source (see the file
README.packages).

New makefile target zipdata-% to zip up data directories in packages.


rw1001
======

The installer, rwinst.exe, now checks for ZIP files as well as zip files,
as some browsers manage to map filenames to uppercase.

There are batch files  Rd2txt.bat Rdconv.bat Rdindex.bat Sd2Rd.bat
which are the equivalent of the Unix `R CMD foo' utilities mentioned in
`Writing R Extensions'.  To use these you must have R_HOME set as an
environment variable (using the form P:/R/rw1001).  There is also a
shell script Rd2dvi.sh which you can use if you have sh.exe (as
used to compile packages) and latex etc. The environment variable
XDVI sets the previewer, defaulting to xdvi.bat.

A file `Makevars' in the `src' directory of a package can be used to
add to/override the MakeDll makefile used to make foo.dll, as on Unix.
(See `Creating shared libraries', section 3.4 of `Writing R Extensions'.)

Under rare conditions (lots of very short input lines) the history buffer
could overrun and so cause crashes. This has been possible since rw0623,
but first caused reported problems in rw1000 and has now been fixed.

Certain HP printer drivers (e.g. the 6/6MP-Postscript driver) reset the
FPU and so were causing crashes.  This has been circumvented in this
version by restoring the settings before and after each page.

Building on a non-default drive should be more reliable, as Perl is
used to find the current drive.


    -------------------------------------------------------------------

    For changes prior to the release of R 1.0.0 on 29 Feb 2000
    see the file CHANGES0 in the source distribution.