[R] PLoS, Arial, R & linux

[(Ted Harding)]

On 19-Nov-09 11:52:57, Deepayan Sarkar wrote:
> 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

Many thanks, Deepayan! I wasn't aware of that route.
Using synaptic on Debian (Etch), with Search: msttcorefonts
the font files were installed quite painlessly. I now have:

/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/arialbd.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/arialbi.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/ariali.ttf
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/arial.ttf

so should be able to make progress as described in the Guidelines.
Ted.

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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk>
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Date: 19-Nov-09                                       Time: 12:17:51
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