The knitr package was written in late 2011, when I knew little about character encodings. I still don’t know much about them today, but I have had enough pain. At RStudio, I have become the (self-nominated) “Character Encoding Ambassador”, mainly because I’m the only native Chinese in the company, and Chinese characters are multibyte. It is common that problems related to character encodings are reported by Chinese users. If we can fix these problems, chances are problems for other languages will disappear at the same time.
The default …