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

[peter dalgaard]

On Aug 19, 2010, at 1:04 PM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

> On Thu, 19 Aug 2010, peter dalgaard wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Aug 19, 2010, at 9:15 AM, Jari Oksanen wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>> 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).
>> 
>> Well, maybe not worthless, but the X11 setup on Mac is poor in general. type="Xlib" appears plainly not to work, and even disregarding the pi issue, the rotated y-axis labels come out pretty ugly. This is why quartz is now the default on OSX.
> 
> The even more serious issue under cairo of confusing style and weight is discussed on ?X11.
> 
>> BTW, it seems that the standard X11 "Symbol","Regular" font is simply absent on OSX. I can't get fc-match to list it, anyway.
> 
> R's X11(type='cairo') device is using a version of cairographics compiled by Simon which includes a static build of fontconfig.  So it is not really 'OSX'!  I'm guessing you are using /usr/local/bin/fc-match which AFAIK also Simon's.

Actually, it was /opt/local/bin/fc-match (macPorts?). I have _three_ of them:

peter-dalgaards-iMac:~ pd$ ls -l /usr/X11/bin/fc-match 
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  64416 Feb 11  2010 /usr/X11/bin/fc-match
peter-dalgaards-iMac:~ pd$ ls -l /usr/local/bin/fc-match 
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 root  wheel  1476560 Oct 21  2008 /usr/local/bin/fc-match
peter-dalgaards-iMac:~ pd$ ls -l /opt/local/bin/fc-match 
-rwxr-xr-x  2 root  admin  14792 Mar 16 16:52 /opt/local/bin/fc-match

Doesn't look like they are behaving any different, though.


> It is also not using pango, and so not selecting fonts the same way as on Linux.

You're assuming (in fact, correctly) that I was using Simon's build, but my locally built version is similar. That doesn't appear to use pango either; I have a Portfile for pango-devel, but it must have failed to build.



-- 
Peter Dalgaard
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com