[R] Italicized greek symbols in PDF plots

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 29 Jun 2011, Sam Albers wrote:

> I know that this has been asked before in other variations but I just can't
> seem to figure out my particular application from previous posts. My
> apologies if I have missed the answer to this question somewhere in the
> archives. I have indeed looked.
>
> I am running Ubuntu 11.04, with R 2.12.1 and ESS+Emacs.
>
> For journal formatting requirements, I need to italicize all the greek
> letters in any plot. This is reasonably straight forward to do and I
> accomplished this task like so:
>
> library(ggplot2)
>
> label_parseall <- function(variable, value) {
>   plyr::llply(value, function(x) parse(text = paste(x)))
> }
>
> dat <- data.frame(x = runif(270, 0, 125), z = rep(LETTERS[1:3], each = 3),
> yy = 1:9, stringsAsFactors = TRUE)
> #unicode italicized delta
> dat$gltr =
> factor(c("italic(\u03b4)^14*N","italic(\u03b4)^15*N","italic(\u03b4)^13*C"))
>
> #So this is what I want my plot to look like:
> plt <- ggplot(data = dat, aes(x = yy, y = x)) +
>    geom_point(aes(x= yy, y=x, shape=z, group=z), alpha=0.4,position =
> position_dodge(width = 0.8)) +
>    facet_grid(gltr~.,labeller= label_parseall, scales="free_y")
> plt
>
> #So then I exported my plot as a PDF like so:
> pdf("Times_regular.pdf", family='Times')
> plt
> dev.off()
> #The problem with this was that the delta symbols turned into dots.

You forgot to set the encoding: see the ?pdf help file.  Greek is most 
likely not covered by the default encoding (and you also forgot the 
'at a minimum' information required by the posting guide, so we don't 
know what your defaults would be).

> #I solved this problem using Cairo
> library(Cairo)
> cairo_pdf("Cairo.pdf")
> plt
> dev.off()
>
>
> The problem that I face now is that I am unsure how to output a figure that
> maintains the greek symbols but outputs everything in the plot as TImes New
> Roman, another requirement of the journal. So I can produce a Times New
> Roman PDF plot and an italicize greek symbol unicode PDF plot but not both.
> Does anoyone have any idea how I might accomplish both of these things
> together in a single PDF?

I woud use cairo_pdf() in base R (and not package Cairo).  Use grid 
facilities to change font, or use the version in R-devel which has a 
family= argument.

>
> Thanks so much in advance,
>
> Sam
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

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That does mean you!

-- 
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