[R] "font problems in X11 with linux R"

[Peter Dalgaard BSA]

"Marc Schwartz" <mschwartz at medanalytics.com> writes:

> >surfaced. When I 
> >use pairs in John Fox's car library e.g.:
> >
> >> pairs(cbind(prestige, income, education, women))
> >Error in text.default(x, y, txt, cex = cex, font = font) : 
> >        X11 font at size 16 could not be loaded
> >In addition: Warning message: 
> >freeing previous text buffer in GText 
> >> 
> >
> >Evidently there is some problem with my fonts or their loading in
> X11.
> > 
> >However, I can add text to a plot up to size 24 but not larger - 
> >
> >"Warning message:
> >X11 used font size 24 when 30 was requested"
> >
> >In addition - when i use help.start() within R and choses 
> > "Search Engine & Keywords" a window pops up with the 
> >following text in the windowbar: "Netscape:subprocess 
> >diagnostics(stdout/stderr)" and the 
> >following message: "Warning: Cannot convert string 
> >"-*-helvetica-*-*-*-*-*-*-12-*-*-*-iso8859-1"to type FontsStruct" but
> 
> >otherwise help.start with Netscape works OK.
> >
> >No other problems with fonts have surfaced - for example I can 
> >use font size 
> >16 in StarOffice 6.0 and Xemacs 21.4 without problems. I 
> >realize that this is 
> >more a Linux or X11 than a R question but actually I don't 
> >know where to 
> >turn.
> >I use SuSE linux 8.1, R 1.62, and Netscape 4.8.
> >How do I fix this problem?
> >
> >Sincerely Fredrik Lundgren
> 
> 
> It sounds like you might not have scaled versions of your fonts loaded
> in /etc/X11/fs/config
> 
> Take a look in there for the following lines, depending upon whether
> you have 75 or 100 dpi fonts loaded:
> 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi:unscaled
> 
> See if there are also the following lines:
> 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi 
> 
> If one of the second set of lines are not present to correspond with
> one of the first two lines, it is likely that scaled versions of your
> fonts are not being loaded by the font server.

I think that on SuSE you want *both* the 75dpi and 100dpi fontsets
installed. The internal code assumes that either you have the full set
of unscaled fonts or have scalable fonts (this is arguably a bug, but
I'm not sure I dare touch that particular piece of code at this
point), and SuSE gives you only one of the unscaled ones bye default.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907