[R] X11 font at size 6 could not be loaded

[Wittner, Ben, Ph.D.]

Dear Prof. Ripley,
Thanks very much.
Changing the locale did not help, but finding and installing (or re-installing)
xorg-x11-fonts for 75 and 100 dpi did the trick.
It's still a bit of a mystery to me, but my attempt to install xorg-x11-fonts
for 100 dpi appeared to fail, but nevertheless I found more 100 dpi
adobe-helvetica fonts available to the X server when I was done.
Thanks also for explaining why my attempt to change the X11fonts option was a
failure.
-Ben

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 5:16 PM
> To: Wittner, Ben, Ph.D.
> Cc: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R] X11 font at size 6 could not be loaded
> 
> Have you also changed your locale?  F8 defaults to UTF-8 locales, whereas
> people usually set up RHEL3 with an 8-bit locale.  That changes the font
> selection, and you may find that running in en_US works whereas en_US.utf8
> does not.
> 
> Note that the font you quote is an 8 point 100dpi font, at 11 pixels not
> points.  What you actually need depends on the dpi of your screen, and if
> that is less than 100 dpi you need the 75dpi fonts.
> 
> Another idea is to install the scalable fonts in the urw-fonts package,
> and use something like
> 
> foo <- getOption("X11fonts")
> foo[1] <- "-urw-nimbus sans l-%s-%s-*-*-%d-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"
> options(X11fonts=foo)
> 
> to select them.
> 
> 
> On Tue, 22 Jan 2008, Wittner, Ben, Ph.D. wrote:
> 
> > I recently upgraded my OS to Fedora 8 from Red Hat Enterprise Work
> > Station 3. Before I upgraded certain operations would produce a warning
> > to the effect that a desired font was not available so one had been
> > substituted, which was okay. After the upgrade to Fedora 8, the plotting
> > operation halts midway through and I get the following error message:
> > "X11 font at size 6 could not be loaded"
> > This is not okay, because plotting does not complete.
> >
> > I've also gotten that message regarding size 8.
> 
> Showing the actual messages would have been helpful.
> 
> >
> > In R, if it do getOption("X11fonts") I get
> > [1] "-adobe-helvetica-%s-%s-*-*-%d-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"
> > [2] "-adobe-symbol-medium-r-*-*-%d-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"
> >
> > If from bash I do xlsfonts, I see that I have fonts that match, but the
> smallest
> > seem to be 11 points:
> > -adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--11-80-100-100-p-60-iso10646-1
> > -adobe-helvetica-bold-o-normal--11-80-100-100-p-60-iso8859-1
> 
> Looks like you don't have the 75dpi fonts installed, so try installing
> those (xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi, it seems).
> 
> > If I run the same program on my Fedora 8 system but use an X server on a
> Windows
> > PC (Hummingbird X server), I have no problem.
> 
> That will have scalable fonts.
> 
> > If I can't fix this, this is a disaster for me because some of the most
> common
> > things I do are afflicted by this problem.
> >
> > Can anyone help me get adobe-helvetica 6 and 8 point fonts onto my
> system or
> > give any other advice?
> >
> > Thanks very much.
> > -Ben
> >
> > p.s., I also tried in R
> > options(X11fonts="-misc-fixed-%s-%s-*-*-%d-*-*-*-*-*-*-*")
> > but that resulted in
> > Error in X11(display, width, height, pointsize, if (is.null(gamma)) 1
> else
> > gamma,  :
> >  invalid 'fonts' value
> > when I tried to plot.
> 
> Yes, it does have to length 2.
> 
> >
> > p.p.s, here's my version information
> > platform       i686-pc-linux-gnu
> > arch           i686
> > os             linux-gnu
> > system         i686, linux-gnu
> > status
> > major          2
> > minor          6.1
> > year           2007
> > month          11
> > day            26
> > svn rev        43537
> > language       R
> > version.string R version 2.6.1 (2007-11-26)
> 
> --
> Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
> Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
> University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
> 1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
> Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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