[Rd] One possible cause for incorrect symbols in X11() output

[Jari Oksanen]

On 19/08/10 09:55 AM, "Prof Brian Ripley" <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

> There have been spasmodic reports of symbols such as pi and infinity
> in plotmath being reproduced incorrectly on the X11 device on some
> Linux systems (at least Ubuntu 10 and Fedora 12/13), and we've managed
> to track down one cause whilst investigating PR#14355.
> 
> Some systems have Wine and hence the Wine symbol font installed.
> 'fontconfig', which is used by cairographics in X11(type='cairo') and
> many other applications, prefers the Wine symbol font to the standard
> Type 1 URW font, and seems to misinterpret its encoding.
> 
> You may well have Wine installed without realizing it (as I did) -- it
> is increasingly common as a dependency of other software. The best
> test is to run
> 
> % fc-match symbol
> s050000l.pfb: "Standard Symbols L" "Regular"
> 
> This is the result on a system without Wine: if you see
> 
> % fc-match symbol
> symbol.ttf: "Symbol" "Regular"
> 
This seems to be the case with MacOS (10.6.4):

$ uname -a
Darwin lettu-2.local 10.4.0 Darwin Kernel Version 10.4.0: Fri Apr 23
18:28:53 PDT 2010; root:xnu-1504.7.4~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
$ fc-match symbol
Symbol.ttf: "Symbol" "標準體"

The X11(type = 'cairo') shows the problem with example(points);
TestChars(font=5). However, there is no problem with the default device
(quartz), nor with the default X11() which has type = 'Xlib' (unlike
documented in ?X11: 'cairo' is available but 'Xlib' still used).

What ever this is worth of (if this is worthless, I'll surely hear about
it).

Cheers, Jari Oksanen