[R] Sweave PDF files show plot symbols as "q"

[Gavin Simpson]

On Wed, 2010-06-30 at 10:19 +0100, Allan Engelhardt wrote:
> I'm guessing this is a FAQ but I can't find it and that it is probably 
> not exclusive R related but relevant so I thought I'd ask:
> 
> When I view the PDF output from Sweave (e.g. Example 1 from the author's 
> web site at [1]) on a Linux system using the standard PDF viewer [2], 
> the circles for the outliers in the plot [boxplot(Ozone ~ Month, data = 
> airquality)] show up as the letter 'q'.
> 
> I have no problems with the PostScript version of the file 
> (example-1.ps) and I have no problems with the PDF file on a Windows 
> machine using the Acrobat reader.  Also, odfWeave is consistent on all 
> systems.
> 
> I need to generate reports from R that work (=look the same) across 
> platforms: does anybody have a suggestion for a workaround?

See ?pdf particularly the Notes section, which has:

     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>
       
HTH

G

> 
> Regards
> 
> Allan
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.statistik.lmu.de/~leisch/Sweave/example-1.pdf
> [2] GNOME Document Viewer 2.28.2 from evince-2.28.2-2.fc12.x86_64
> 
>  > sessionInfo()
> R version 2.11.0 (2010-04-22)
> x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
> 
> locale:
>   [1] LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
>   [3] LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_GB.UTF-8
>   [5] LC_MONETARY=C              LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.UTF-8
>   [7] LC_PAPER=en_GB.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C
>   [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
> [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_GB.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
> 
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices datasets  utils     methods   base
> 
> other attached packages:
> [1] fortunes_1.3-7 ctv_0.6-0
> 
> ______________________________________________
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