[R] PLoS, Arial, R & linux

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 4:30 PM, Ted Harding
<Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk> wrote:
> Greetings All.
> According to the PLoS (Public Library of Science) Guidelines
> for Figure preparation, if a figure is submitted as EPS rather
> than TIFF then "Figure text must be in Arial font" -- see:
>
> [1]
> http://www.plosntds.org/static/figureGuidelines.action#text
>
> and also other sections in that web-page
>
> [2]
> http://www.plosntds.org/static/figureGuidelines.action
>
> Now, Arial font is not (as a rule) available in Linux, and
> EPS diagrams prepared using R graphics will call for Helvetica
> (by default). Of course the Helvetica family is very similar to
> Arial, but the in-file font references will call for Helvetica
> so a production system which is expecting calls for Arial may
> be thrown off the rails by an EPS file which calls for Helvetica.
>
> While there is a section ("Enable the use of Arial in R") in the

The fact that there is such a section suggests that they accept the
resulting files, doesn't it?

> Guidelines (URL [2]), the instructions assume the presence of
> Arial ".ttf" files, not usually the case with Linux.

But easy enough to fix (completely legally, thanks to a licensing
oversight by Microsoft):

http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

In Debian (and I assume Ubuntu):

$ sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

-Deepayan

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