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

[Paul Murrell]

Hi

Thanks for your input on this Iñaki and Nicolas.

I am starting testing an R fix for this problem today.

As suggested, the plan is to allow the R user to specify a font family 
other than "symbol" for plotmath output (or, more generally, in R 
parlance, for 'font=5' or 'fontface=5') on a Cairo-based graphics device.

Paul


On 27/03/20 11:30 pm, Iñaki Ucar wrote:
> 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
> 
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