[Rd] italic font on cairo devices in R 3.4

[frederik at ofb.net]

Hi Ilia,

I'm running Arch Linux, R 3.4.0.

Here's my test.pdf from your minimal example: https://ptpb.pw/HxsA.pdf

It doesn't look pixelated to me...

Here's a post that I wrote when I solved my last font problem in R,
almost 2 years ago:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/40940331/5087283

I had to install some Microsoft font packages, which is sad, because
there are some perfectly good free fonts that R could be using
instead. It could be considered a bug that R requires Microsoft fonts,
at least by default. However, does this even fix your problem? I.e. if
you install the corresponding Debian Microsoft font packages, does the
text appear anti-aliased?

Frederick

On Fri, Jul 07, 2017 at 10:30:46AM +0200, Ilia Kats wrote:
> [cross-post from R-help]
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I have the following problem: Since R 3.4.0, italic fonts rendered on Cairo
> devices appear pixelated. Here's a minimal example:
> cairo_pdf('test.pdf')
> plot(1:10, ylab=expression(italic(test)))
> dev.off()
> 
> The same problem occurs with bolditalic, but not bold. I am using Debian
> Stretch. Several friends tried the same on their machines, another Debian
> machine has the same problem. On MacOSX the output was not pixelated, but it
> wasn't italic either. Ubuntu 16.04.2 xenial works fine. My impression is
> that R somehow can't find the proper font to use and falls back to something
> weird. Ideas?
> 
> Note that I'm not subscribed to the list, so please CC me in replies.
> 
> Cheers, Ilia
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>