Plotmath on Fedora 31 broken with with pango >= 1.44 - workarounds?
On Wed, 25 Mar 2020 at 12:25, Nicolas Mailhot
<nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
<snip> R brought this all on itself by hardcoding a Windows-only ?Symbol? font family name in its default conf. Linux systems are UTF-8 by default for ~20 years now, they don?t need the forcing of magic font families to handle symbols not present in the 8-bit legacy Windows encodings. The actual effect of this conf is not the selection of font files with special and unusual symbols. It is to priorize fonts that match the "Symbol" magic name. And those fonts are few and crumbling on Linux systems, because no one has needed to bother with them since Linux switched to UTF-8 last millenium. Just stop using ?Symbol? in R and things will work a lot better. Alternatively, prepare to maintain the ?Symbol? aliasing stack in fontconfig (and fight with wine for it), because *no* *one* *else* *cares* about this legacy Windows-specific stuff.
So, in the light of Nicolas' input (thanks!), I think that font selection should be fixed upstream in R. I'd be happy to put all this together in R's bugzilla, but I don't have an account. Could someone please invite me? I?aki