[R] Strange pdf() in Fedora 15

[Marc Schwartz]

On Sep 15, 2011, at 7:06 AM, Petar Milin wrote:

> Hello useRs!
> Recently, I migrated from Debian i386 to Fedora 15 64-bit, after a long
> and happy experiences with Debian distributions (first Ubuntu, later
> Debian itself). I installed R with yum install R, and then necessary
> packages. Everything seems to work fine, for now, except that exporting
> plots with pdf() gives quite an ugly output: instead of nice dots (as
> always before), I am getting some weird sign that resembles to lower 'q'
> or 'g' or, even more, to neck-down half-note (minim).
> 
> Can anyone give me some advice how to make this thing right? Why is this
> happening? It is pretty annoying.
> 
> All the best,
> PM


See ?pdf and note the following in the Note section:

On some systems the default plotting character pch = 1 is displayed in some PDF viewers incorrectly as a "q" character. (These seem to be viewers based on the poppler PDF rendering library). This may be due to incorrect or incomplete mapping of font names to those used by the system. Adding the following lines to ‘~/.fonts.conf’ or ‘/etc/fonts/local.conf’ may circumvent this problem.

<fontconfig>    
<alias binding="same">
  <family>ZapfDingbats</family>
  <accept><family>Dingbats</family></accept>
</alias>
</fontconfig>  

Some further workarounds for problems with symbol fonts on viewers using ‘fontconfig’ are given in the ‘Cairo Fonts’ section of the help for X11.



HTH,

Marc Schwartz