Unicode in rgl plot3d

Question

I'm all new to R, and the rgl packageand having searched all over all day for a solution...

I'm trying to use rgl's text3d function with unicode text. I have no problem plotting the same chars in 2D (using text()), but in 3D, instead of rendering the symbols it just writes out the UTF-8 char codes (unless they're ascii chars).

I'm reading in data from file where the column "vowel" contains the symbols to be plotted (eg "ei ə ɪ ɒ" etc.), and cols "F1", "F2" and "F3" contain the values to be plotted. The file is read in with read.delim with encoding="UTF-8"; and inspecting the data in the RGui shows the UTF-8 char codes for any non-ascii symbols.

Sample data (comma-delimited)

vowel,F1,F2,F3
i,424.1352452,1985.143387,2549.272611
e,515.0401373,1693.077496,2534.527142
ə,408.8233704,1589.12993,2567.448424
ɒ,490.6565129,1070.564989,2590.467597
ɪ,405.5223379,1665.733731,2261.069994
u,360.0803517,1798.355786,2354.845875
ɜ,541.6360766,1323.593646,2435.121753
ɑ,718.8871543,1139.013741,2820.694337
ɑ,629.1691413,1064.047107,2910.997552
ɪ,375.0097039,2091.996102,2648.991664

This is the code I've been testing with:

d <- read.delim("my.filename", header=TRUE, sep=",", encoding="UTF-8")

Plotting in 3D (plots things like "<\\U+0252>" etc. (escaped here!) for all non-ASCII chars):

library(rgl)

cols <- c("F1", "F2", "F3");
plot3d(d[,cols], xlab="F1", ylab="F2", zlab="F3", type="n");
text3d(d[,cols], col=1, text=d$vowel);

Plotting in 2D (works):

cols <- c("F1", "F2");
plot(d[,cols], xlab="F1", ylab="F2", type="n");
text(d[,cols], col=1, labels=d$vowel);

Does it have something to do with OpenGL? I've installed freetype, hoping that might solve the issue, but I haven't managed to point R to it - so it issues warnings "par3d(useFreeType = TRUE) : FreeType not supported in this build" and "In par3d(useFreeType = TRUE) : font family "sans" not found, using "bitmap""...

Having spent several hours battling R for freetype, I was hoping someone here can tell me whether freetype will even solve the issue??! If yes, a hint as to what "Set the environment variable LIB_FREETYPE to give the full path to the install directory" (from rgl README ) is trying to tell me to do would be hugely appreciated!

Thank you.

My sessionInfo:

R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25) Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

locale: LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252
LC_CTYPE=English_United Kingdom.1252
LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.1252
LC_NUMERIC=C
LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252

attached base packages: stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base

other attached packages: rgl_0.93.975

Answer 1

You need to have FreeType installed. Make sure you have FreeType and FreeType Open GL libraries installed, then reinstall rgl in R and then everything works.

See here also : http://www.smnd.sk/kotanyi/index.php?page=rgl