[R] Wrong symbol rendering in plots (Ubuntu)

[Ben Bolker]

Yvonnick NOEL <yvonnick.noel <at> uhb.fr> writes:

> 
> Hello,
> 
> I have the very same problem. Plotting code that used to work before I
> upgraded to Ubuntu Lucid Lynx does not work anymore. For example:
> 
> plot(1:10)
> text(6,4,expression(pi))
> 
> The 'pi' greek letter appear as a \neq ("different from" symbol).
> 
> Yvonnick Noel
> 
> 

  Does the workaround pointed out later in the thread you're
responding to (from the last paragraph of a very long 'Note'
section of ?pdf) help?

  If not it might be worth continuing this thread on r-devel .
It does seem that there are two (related?) issues, one with
pch=1 and the other with Symbol (???) fonts ...

 For reference:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1325289

 although it's also not clear whether this is exactly
the same issue, or a related/similar one.
  
============================
 On some systems the default plotting character ‘pch = 1’ is
     displayed in some PDF viewers incorrectly as a ‘"q"’ character.
     (These seem to be viewers based on the ‘poppler’ PDF rendering
     library). This may be due to incorrect or incomplete mapping of
     font names to those used by the system.  Adding the following
     lines to ‘~/.fonts.conf’ or ‘/etc/fonts/local.conf’ may circumvent
     this problem.

     
     
     <alias binding="same">
            <family>ZapfDingbats</family>
            <accept><family>Dingbats</family></accept>
     </alias>