[R] X11 font problem

[Martyn Plummer]

David,

This is a problem with your X11 set up.  R 1.1.0 expects to load the
graphics font (Helvetica medium) in exactly the right size, but the
font server isn't delivering.

On Red Hat Linux, the Helvetica font comes with the XFree86-75dpi-fonts
package.  If you look in the configuration file for the font server,
(/etc/X11/fs/config) there should be two lines corresponding to 75dpi
in the catalogue list

        /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled,
and
        /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi,

If the latter line is missing, then the font server will not be
able to scale up the font to the right size. Don't add it by hand
though, there is a special command for manipulating the catalogue
called "chkfntpath". Run the following two commands - as root
when you are not running X

/usr/sbin/chkfontpath -q -r /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi
/usr/sbin/chkfontpath -q -a /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi

The demo will now work, but the title will appear ugly and blocky
(because it is a bitmap font).  Certain web sites that insist on
using helvetica will look pretty ugly too.

Martyn

On 02-Jul-00 David Peebles wrote:
> Dear R users,
> 
> I've just upgraded from R 0.64.1 to 1.1.0 on a PC running Red Hat Linux
> 6.0.  When I ran demo(graphics), after the command:
> 
> title(main = "January Pie Sales", cex.main = 1.8, font.main = 1)
> 
> the plot did not materialise and I received this error message: 
> 
> Error in title(main = "January Pie Sales", cex.main = 1.8, font.main = 1)
>: X11 font at size 22 could not be loaded
> 
> similarly, when I enter the following commands
> 
>> testdata <- read.table("test.dat", header=T)
>> pairs(testdata)
> 
> I get the following response:
> 
> Hit <Return> to see next plot: 
> Error in text.default(x, y, txt, cex = cex, font = font) : 
>       X11 font at size 16 could not be loaded
> In addition: Warning message: 
> freeing previous text buffer in GStrWidth 
> 
> These errors did not occur in my previous version of R.  Looking at the
> files ONEWS and NEWS that came with the 1.0.0 and 1.1.0 releases
> respectively, I notice that a great deal has changed with X11 font
> handling in R since version 0.64.1.  I confess that I am still rather
> inexperienced in the R system and so don't know whether these errors are
> because of R, my Linux setup or some combination of the two.
> 
> Any comments and/or advice would be gratefully received.
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