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

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le lundi 30 mars 2020 à 15:24 +1300, Paul Murrell a écrit :
> Hi
> 
> I have created an R branch that contains a potential fix ...
> 
> https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-symfam/
> 
> This allows, for example, ...
> 
> cairo_pdf(symbolfamily="OpenSymbol")
> 
> ... to specify that the OpenSymbol family should be used as the
> "symbol" font (e.g., for "plotmath") in R.

Thanks for looking at it!

But, really, there is no such thing as a Symbol font on Linux anymore.
Symbol is pre-unicode thinking. Most modern general-purpose unicode
fonts will include every codepoint Symbol ever shipped, and fontconfig
will fallback gracefully when that’s not the case (unless your
fontconfig integration is broken).

Just use the sans-serif or monospace fontconfig defaults. You don’t
need Symbol, or OpenSymbol, or any special font setup.

Symbol’s codepoint coverage is laughable by 2020’s UTF-8 standards.

Symbol << Normal Unicode font (DejaVu*) << Special math fonts (STIX2)

I you do advanced math stuff, you may need a special math font like
STIX, but that’s lights years more advanced than Symbol, and a general
purpose font like DejaVu has been shipping a MATH block for several
years now

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot