[R-pkgs] tikzDevice 0.5.3 released to CRAN

[Charlie Sharpsteen]

A new release of the tikzDevice was posted to CRAN today and will soon
be available from mirrors worldwide.  The tikzDevice package provides
a graphics device that translates R graphics into TeX code suitable
for seamless integration with LaTeX documents.  Version 0.5.3 of the
tikzDevice is a bugfix release that addresses clarity of warning/error
messages and enhances the handling of characters that are special to
LaTeX.  Details are contained in the changelog at the end of this
announcement.

Barring the discovery of significant issues, the next release of the
tikzDevice should be version 0.6.0.  This release is planned to
contain new functionality drawn from one or both of the following
development efforts:

- Support for UTF8 plot text when tikzDevice is used with the XeTeX engine.

- Support for the raster and polypath additions to the R graphics engine.


---

### Version: 0.5.3

---

#### Bug Fixes

- R 2.12.x now throws a warning message when shell commands run via `system()`
  have non-zero exit conditions.  The metric calculation runs LaTeX on a file
  containing an \@@end command.  This causes a non zero exit condition.  The end
  result was that users were getting spammed by warning messages.  These
  messages have been gagged for now and a better way to run LaTeX such that a
  non-zero condition can meaningfully indicate an error is being investigated.

- The range of characters the default sanitizer looks for has been extended.  It
  should now process all characters that are special to TeX with the exception
  of backslashes.  Documentation has been improved.

- Detection of failed string metric calculations has been strengthened and the
  resulting error message has been improved.


Happy TeXing!

-The tikzDevice team