[Rd] Plotmath on Fedora 31 broken with with pango >= 1.44 - workarounds?

[Iñaki Ucar]

On Wed, 25 Mar 2020 at 12:25, Nicolas Mailhot
<nicolas.mailhot using laposte.net> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> R brought this all on itself by hardcoding a Windows-only “Symbol” font
> family name in its default conf. Linux systems are UTF-8 by default for
> ~20 years now, they don’t need the forcing of magic font families to
> handle symbols not present in the 8-bit legacy Windows encodings.
>
> The actual effect of this conf is not the selection of font files with
> special and unusual symbols. It is to priorize fonts that match the
> "Symbol" magic name. And those fonts are few and crumbling on Linux
> systems, because no one has needed to bother with them since Linux
> switched to UTF-8 last millenium.
>
> Just stop using “Symbol” in R and things will work a lot better.
> Alternatively, prepare to maintain the “Symbol” aliasing stack in
> fontconfig (and fight with wine for it), because *no* *one* *else*
> *cares* about this legacy Windows-specific stuff.

So, in the light of Nicolas' input (thanks!), I think that font
selection should be fixed upstream in R. I'd be happy to put all this
together in R's bugzilla, but I don't have an account. Could someone
please invite me?

Iñaki