Plotmath on Fedora 31 broken with with pango >= 1.44 - workarounds?
Hi I have created an R branch that contains a potential fix ... https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-symfam/ This allows, for example, ... cairo_pdf(symbolfamily="OpenSymbol") ... to specify that the OpenSymbol family should be used as the "symbol" font (e.g., for "plotmath") in R. This is just a separate branch for now because, while I have tested it under Unbuntu 18.04 and Fedora 31, I cannot even build R for Windows (right now) or Mac (ever) and I do not want to drop a bomb on R-devel at this stage of the release process for R 4.0.0. The attached file contains at least an outline of steps required to do a minimal test if anyone wants to try the fix on Linux. cc'ing Simon and Jeroen in case they are able to help with checking that this builds and works on Mac and/or Windows. NOTEs: - 'symbolfamily' can only be specified when a graphics device is opened, and it is then fixed for that device. - on Windows, for cairo-based devices, the "symbol" font is still hard-coded as "Standard Symbols L" Paul
On 30/03/20 8:15 am, Paul Murrell wrote:
Hi Thanks for your input on this I?aki and Nicolas. I am starting testing an R fix for this problem today. As suggested, the plan is to allow the R user to specify a font family other than "symbol" for plotmath output (or, more generally, in R parlance, for 'font=5' or 'fontface=5') on a Cairo-based graphics device. Paul On 27/03/20 11:30 pm, I?aki Ucar wrote:
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
______________________________________________ R-devel at r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
Dr Paul Murrell Department of Statistics The University of Auckland Private Bag 92019 Auckland New Zealand 64 9 3737599 x85392 paul at stat.auckland.ac.nz http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/