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R CMD INSTALL has new options --no-R, --no-libs, --no-data, --no-help, --no-demo, --no-exec, and --no-inst to suppress installation of the specified part of the package. These are intended for special purposes (e.g. building a database of help pages without fully installing all packages).
Input from the Rgui console was changing the letter 255 (ÿÿ in Latin-2) in the character set to letter 1.