Histograms on Windows: Update to R 4.2

[elinw]

Pretty sure R 4.2 on Windows should fix this.

There is a known issue in which the in-line histograms and line graphs do not render correctly in windows. This is due to an issue that is deep within the handling of special characters (UTF-8) in Windows and in data frames on the R side of things.

In the console this can sometimes be addressed by making some specific changes to locale as outlined in the documentation.

In rmarkdown documents there may be some instances where you can generate better results, but in general on Windows you will have to simply not try to display the graphs. There are multiple ways to do this described in the documentation.

[mik3y64]

Is there a timeline of when this issue will be fixed? Without main features of histograms and line graphs, Windows users can't use it.

[michaelquinn32]

Hi!

The issue is beyond the scope of skimr and is tied to R's lack of full support for unicode text.

There is a lot of documentation on and tools for how to work around the issue on windows, including

• the function fix_windows_histograms(): https://docs.ropensci.org/skimr/reference/fix_windows_histograms.html
• the function skim_without_charts(): https://docs.ropensci.org/skimr/reference/skim.html
• the fonts vignette: docs.ropensci.org/skimr/articles/Using_fonts.html

Try some of these and see if they help.

Best wishes,
Michael

[bwiernik]

See here for a discussion of this longstanding issue with UTF-8 in R for Windows and how it might possibly be resolved: https://developer.r-project.org/Blog/public/2020/07/30/windows/utf-8-build-of-r-and-cran-packages/index.html